GREAT product so far...but not able to play all AVI files

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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howjltx
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Joined: 17 Aug 2017, 10:52

GREAT product so far...but not able to play all AVI files

#1 Post by howjltx »

Using PhotpRec has been the only file that has been close to helping.....I get a lot of the AVI files but they do not play (corrupted)

In this forum I see trying different video players now which may reconstruct the videos

History:
Wife was in an accident not her fault but because she speaks poor English (she's from Ukraine) the party at fault says "its my word against your wifes word and there is no witness and she doesn't speak English therefore it is her fault (this is typical and the reason I have a dashcam) need to recover the video of the accident that just got erased 3 minutes earlier

PhotoRec did an excellent job of recovering hundreds of my AVI and jpg files from a dashcam's micro sd card, however I cannot play most of the AVIs which are unplayable, some play but it is like two different time frames of files are combined into one AVI file. I am currently experimenting with different PhotoRec recovery options (sd card shows up as both Drive F and "SD VOL" so trying both of these plus selecting "Other" file type and doing both whole disk and allso Free space recovery'. This has been sucessfull at creating files that play sometimes even though they are corrupted

IS THERE ANY SPECIFIC OPTIONS I SHOULD USE TO RECOVER AVI FILES ON A microSD CARD
Can I look at the dash cams system to figure out the settings I should use (unfortunately I have only a minimum amount of software programming experience in C++ and am just a little IT tech savvy and willing to try myself)
looks like there are both FAT16 (from a year ago) files recovered and also FAT32 - dont know why it is mixed always in the same dashCam

This is a 4GB sim card that creates 8 or 9 folders, each containing about the same number of AVI files in each folder
the Dash cam is in loop recording mode which after it fills up the 9 folders containing 9 files (file size varies from few hundred megabytes to about 600 mbytes), it erases the oldest folder and files to create new ones
Looking at all the videos, I see that the loop recording may have just written over the video of the accident file (and wife forgot to save the file or unplug the video cam) about 3 minutes earlier (or 500m Mbytes of memory)
Meaning if the camera would have been stopped recording 3 minutes before she arrived home, the AVI file I need would not have been lost
I do not know if this is recoverable, even by paying an expert?

Any other suggestions

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cgrenier
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Re: GREAT product so far...but not able to play all AVI files

#2 Post by cgrenier »

On some camera, the header is written once all data have been written on the disk, so the header is physically after the data.
To deal with such layout, try the steps described in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf "Recovering lost videos from a memory card using PhotoRec"

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