The dissertation that opens as symbols, the QuickBooks file the software flatly refuses, the wedding video that plays four seconds and dies — corruption is data present but disordered, and the fix depends entirely on where the disorder lives: in the file, the file system, or the drive beneath both.
$ ldr mount /dev/sdb1 → Device: Synology DS (SHR) → Status: DEGRADED — second drive failing → Client: confidential · Rotherham $ ldr array-rebuild → Disks: imaged before any rebuild → Volume: reassembled from images → btrfs: repaired · 97% $ ldr verify → ✓ family_share — recovered → ✓ photos — intact → ✓ no rebuild attempted — right call
Drive-level: failing sectors serve up files with holes in — corruption as a symptom of hardware decline, where the priority is imaging the drive before ‘a few odd files’ becomes ‘a drive that won’t mount’. File-system-level: the index linking names to content has tangled — files vanish, folders turn to gibberish entries, drives demand formatting — while the content itself sits intact awaiting reconstruction. File-level: the document itself took the hit (interrupted save, crash mid-write): here recovery means structural repair — rebuilding headers, salvaging streams, extracting text and objects from Office files, re-muxing video whose index never got written. The diagnostic pins the layer first, because treating the wrong one wastes the patient.
Straight talk about what repair can do: it rebuilds structure, it cannot invent substance that was never there. A Word file whose text survives behind a broken wrapper comes back whole; a video missing its index re-muxes and plays; a spreadsheet with damaged formulas can surrender its data even when Excel refuses the file. But content that was never written — the crash happened before the save finished — cannot be conjured, and a file whose middle third is zeros keeps its hole. You’ll get the file-by-file verdict at diagnostic: repairable, extractable, or honestly gone — free, before any decision.
Usually not. A screenful of symbols normally means a damaged wrapper around content that has survived, and the text can be extracted even from files Word itself refuses to open. Send the corrupt file and any temp or backup versions alongside — Office scatters useful fragments the recovery can weave in.
Classically, yes. That is a missing or truncated index — common when a recording was interrupted — and re-muxing rebuilds the wrapper around footage that is entirely present. If the camera or card it came from is available, send that too — the original source sometimes yields a cleaner copy.
Corruption on that scale is a symptom, not a coincidence — a failing drive, a file system coming apart, or malware. Stop using the machine — especially stop running repair utilities on it — and bring the drive. Fixing files individually while the cause still runs is bailing a boat with the plug out.