MKV files recovered by not playable?

howardb

howardb

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Got a bit of a problem with some MKV files and was hoping a guru could assist or offer advice:
I split and transferred part of my movie library (all MKV) from a 2TB drive to another 2TB drive last week, in order to create some extra drive space. After the transfer was complete, I moved the two HDD's from inside the PC to external USB3 enclosures - all seemed to go well. Both HDD's are NTFS formatted.

Yesterday I tried to access the first drive and got the message that the drive needs to be formatted - I did nothing, just powered it off - then checked the second drive and all was good - I could access all the MKV files, etc.
The first drive was removed from the USB3 enclosure and plugged back into the PC, per before, and I got the same message saying the drive needs to be formatted. The strange thing is that they were all accessible and playble before the drive was moved to the USB3 enclosure...

In Windows computer manager, the drive reflects, but shows it is "Raw" - I can see the total MKV data size is still there, however Windows cannot access the data on the drive - seems to have lost the NTFS "formatting".

I got a copy of EaseUS Recovery Pro and scanned the drive - all the files are there and can be recovered - ran the recovery overnight (recovered to a different drive) and it managed to recover all the MKV files, or so I thought - all the original file names/sizes are all there, however the recovered MKV's will not play at all - the media player says it cannot render the file; this seems to be with all the recovered MKV's. When testing other MKV's from another drive, they play fine, so I don't think it's a codec corruption issue.

Any ideas on how I can recover the MKV files to the original playable format?
 
Ive always used R-Studio for recovery, maybe try that
 
Oh and i had a similar issue with a usb3 hd plugged directly into pc, needed to be formatted...
 
The drive went corrupt some how, not ejecting properly or perhaps you transferred static to it when you touched it.

Recovering Videos rarely work properly. You could try opening it with some video encoding software like virtual dub to "repair" the file, however I am very certain you will have missing parts and lots of glitches.
 
psion said:
The drive went corrupt some how, not ejecting properly or perhaps you transferred static to it when you touched it.

Recovering Videos rarely work properly. You could try opening it with some video encoding software like virtual dub to "repair" the file, however I am very certain you will have missing parts and lots of glitches.
Click to expand...

Thanks psion. Will also try virtual dub and see what happens. Was careful to eject the drive properly (after power-down) and have always been careful re static transfer.
 
Thanks everyone for all the input and suggestions; it's been a bit hit and miss with most programs either failing or only partly recovering the files - they were still unplayable though.

R-Studio however seems to be doing the trick - busy running now, but so far it's managed to identify all the MKV's and recovered 20 of them in full, and they play perfectly per originally - it's only been going a few hours and still has 18-odd hours left.
It took about 4.5 hours to scan/index the entire HDD, but it's seemingly found everything - I'm really impressed - thanks again rakabos3 ;)

Will report back further once R-Studio has completed the recovery.
 
Have you tried to compare one of the corrupted files with a working version of the same file to see if anything really simple has gone wrong? Maybe you can save one and compare it with the same file after passing it through R-Studio or just download the original again.
 
Yotch said:
Have you tried to compare one of the corrupted files with a working version of the same file to see if anything really simple has gone wrong? Maybe you can save one and compare it with the same file after passing it through R-Studio or just download the original again.
Click to expand...

I haven't compared files yet, will try that when the recovery is done (8 hours to go still...).
Based on the initial scan by R-Studio, the HDD seems to have lost the NTFS partition information - it's there but not accessible by Windows. So far all recovered files are intact, but will compare to a downloaded version of the original just to be sure...
 
Damn, got home to find that the new 2TB HDD I'm recovering onto to seems to have failed...the recovery was running for 20-odd hours!!!
The HDD will not be identified by Windows now (it powers up for about 20 seconds, then seems to go dead) - to start over again, this time doing 10-or-so files at a time.
 
What can I say, R-Studio is awesome - recovered everything without any loss! Thanks again rakabos3 ;)
Just need to figure out the HDD issues now and why it happened...
 
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