Data Recovery and File Signatures

swegner wrote on 5/3/2006, 6:56 PM

I am attempting to recover Vegas Movie Studio project files from a hard drive that was corrupted.

The data recovery application I am using, only found a few project files (i.e. *.vf *.vf.bak *.sfvidcap) and some of my video files (*.avi). I am not too concerned about the missing video files, since I can recapture them fairly easily by using the recapture option inside of the Vegas Movie Studio, but this will only work if I can recover a project file (*.vf and *.sfvidcap).

The data recovery application has an option to recover files with particular files based on their signatures and I am trying to find the missing project file by their signature.

The data recovery program uses an INI file to describe the file signatures:
[LOSTFILES]
; NAME EXT SIGLENGTH SIG TYPE SIZE
winword1= DOC,4, $9b,$a5,$21,$00, 1, 10000
BMP-file= BMP,2, $42,$4d, 12, [2, 4]

This definition will find all files (i.e. word documents) that contain the first four bytes = 9B A5 21 00.
NOTE: The definition can also get size of file from the file itself -- BMP size is at the byte stored as double word.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Comments

G8R_J wrote on 5/4/2006, 10:36 AM

I'm not sure if this is the answer you're looking for but I recently had a hard drive die and needed to recover files. I put the old hard drive in a USB drive enclosure, which are readily available and not too expensive. WIndows XP recognized and installed the USB drive without any problems. I was then able to locate the data files and transfer them from the old old drive to the new one using Windows Explorer. I did this using 2 computers but you can do the same thing if you install a new drive in your computer, format it, reinstall Windows and other software then copy data from the old drive. Now you can reformat your old drive and use it in the enclosure as a backup external hard drive.

Jay

swegner wrote on 5/4/2006, 4:47 PM

The hard drive that was corrupted was in an USB/Firewire enclosure and that is how I believe it got corrupted. The hard drive only contained data files, so I do not needed to reinstall any applications on it. I only would like to recover the Vegas Movie Studio files that no longer exist in the disk partition table from that hard drive (due to the corruption).

allyn wrote on 5/4/2006, 10:57 PM

i checked two .vf files from vms4. they both started with these exact hex characters:
69 72 66 66 91 2e 11 cf d6 a5 db 28 c1 04 00 00

the 2 bytes after that are the length of the file.

good luck.

swegner wrote on 5/5/2006, 4:36 PM

Thank you very much.

I was able to recover the other project files using the signature you provided.

Here is the definition I ended up with:
VF-File= VF,6, $72,$69,$66,$66,$2E,$91, 1, [16,4]