I was hoping to ressurect a specific .rar file that I deleted yesterday from the recycle bin and I believe I found it after using the Deep Scan option, although the file name is garbled into something else. Anyhow, Recuva lists it as in "excellent" condition and so I selected to recover it and saved it to a different drive. Some other files work fine, but this one displays an error message when I attempt to open it. It tells me "The archive is either in unknown format or damaged". I don't see how it could be in an unknown format since it says .rar so I assume it must be damaged for some reason? Is there anything that can be done to repair it? I just don't understand since it was listed as in "excellent" condition to be recovered. Could someone please help me or explain what went wrong?

i'm having the same problem with excellent jpgs: recuva can't handle them. the files were photographed last night, with no chances for overwrite by any program. and yet, those files recuva says are "unrecoverable" or "poor" were 99% recovered perfectly.

go figure...

[ a few minutes later ] tried another recovery program (testdisk and photorec) and was able to recover ALL of the files from the partition, including those recuva had marked as "excellent" but was unable to recover... the program uses an extremely primitive dos interface, and it's not for the faint of heart, but it worked first time.

Do you guys have Vista or XP? Found this page by the way - 17 Free File Recovery Programs: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery...ry-programs.htm
And this: this: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/File_Format...red_By_PhotoRec
Also: Give Away of the Day has this today. Windows 7 fully supported. GRT Deleted Files Recovery for NTFS: http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

Perhaps a read of Dennis's experience when using Recuva may help

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=23991