I work for Office Depot, in the tech department. Basically, one of our associates was supposed to do a data backup, and re-install Windows 7, then transfer the files back. He used Windows Easy Transfer and compacted everything into a 163 GB file.
Now comes the hard part. When we try to put it back on his computer ((drag-and-drop to the desktop) which has been wiped back to factory settings using the recovery partition), it stops at 79.5 GB remaining (you know how it doesn't give you a % of completion, it just shows how many GB are remaining) and then says "Can't read from the source file or disk" and gives you an option to try again, or cancel. It gets hung up on the same point each time.
Normally, this wouldn't be a huge issue, but the contents on the drive are his wife's architect blueprints and interior design stuff, along with wedding photos, etc, which are the only copies they have. On top of those, they have court documents and other important files that we are unable to access now.
I wasn't involved with this transfer, so I'm trying to clean up the mess as best I can. I remembered that the customer's wife was Russian, and had some files typed with a Russian keyboard, so on and so forth. I wonder if that's the issue? If not, I really have no idea how to manually extract things from a ".mig" file, or how to diagnose what area is potentially corrupted.
In light of this situation, we tried using "Recuva" to recover the files post-wipe, but everything was corrupted or unable to be opened, and it also extracted and recovered all of the "useless" photos, such as the skype logos, up and down arrows for browsers, etc (it was 160,000+ photos).
Trying to avoid a potential lawsuit, unhappy customer, and costing the company lots of money to see if professionals can get into this external hard drive.
Other relevant information:
We used a Toshiba 500 GB (465 GB) external hard drive.
Customer's computer is an HP Pavilion P6000 Series (Model No. p6520y) running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Service Pack 1.
Any other information that is needed can be provided, thanks in advance, and hopefully we can find a solution to this issue quickly!
-John