Recovered data corrupt, why?

[fixitdude74]

I have recently recovered some data off a friends drive from his laptop.

I used Uneraser(found 99% of deleted files) to recover the lost data, but one particular folder will not allow me to open the files within it. These files are jpg's , and the title appears in green, leading me to think they are associated with a program. The laptop died but i suspect a virus has corrupted the boot sector as the drive would not boot when put into another Toshiba pro satellite 6100 and fired up.

I have tried to open them with just about every program i could find without any luck, kodak easyshare says they are corrupt.

Is it possible that this file has been corrupted by a virus, and not the other files and folders in the same root directory?

It seems weird, i have not seen this before.

Can anyone help please?

Edited February 3, 2007 by fixitdude74

[jaclaz]

It is very possible that they are corrupt, not necessarily by a virus, it could be a HD failure, a filesystem one, as well as they could have been partially overwritten or "cross-linked", or it could even be a "glitch" in the recovery program.

By the same principle, the drive can be unbootable for a number of causes, it's impossible to say that it does not boot because of a virus, unlesss you find evidence of it.

There are tools to try and recover corrupted .jpg files, at least partially, but it's impossible to say if any of them would work on those files.

Here are a few of them:

http://www.officerecovery.com/pixrecovery/

http://www.clarity.net/~adam/recoverpix.html

http://www.hketech.com/JPEG-recovery/index.php

http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/Digital...y-Software.html

but there are many more.

jaclaz

[Cheeze]

well don't files and folders adopt a green title when they are encrypted? is it possible that they are just saying its corrupt but they have been encrypted?

[fixitdude74]

Thanks for the replys, i tend to think that they may be encrypted as a friend said that he may have inadvertantly added encryption to this folder, i will soldier on, i've found a few more data recovery programs to delve a bit deeper.

Thanks again.