Hi -- I'm new here, and am probably too sleepy to ask for help in an intelligent fashion, but would appreciate any assistance (or pointing me to a similar solved thread...) you can provide.
I recently restored an accidentally re-formatted hard drive for a friend (using Pandora Recovery). The user couldn't even tell me what operating system he was using -- I'm guessing Windows Vista or Windows 7. Not sure if it's 32-bit or 64-bit. Although I was thrilled that it recovered many files from what appeared to be a mostly blank drive, I'm having trouble figuring out how to provide these files back to the owner in a directory structure he can easily access and understand. (i.e., there were over 3000 recovery directories [recup_dir.1, ..., recup_dir.3665].
Although I can (I think) successfully search for the types of files I want to organize, I'm very worried that there are duplicate filenames (especially with photo files). I ran a few practice searches and even tried using xxcopy -- but so far the only successful retrievals I've had dump the search results into a folder with the same subdirectory structure as the files were originally in (not sure that makes sense, but all of the .jpg files would be dumped in a folder called "jpgs" that would contain subdirectories such as recup_dir.1, recup_dir.4, etc.). While I understand how to sift through the folders for search results, I don't think the hard drive owner will -- hence my need to simplify the directory structure.
My goal is to install Windows 7 on a new hard drive and create a few folders for his restored files (such as "Videos," "Music, "Documents," etc.). I haven't reviewed the restored files thoroughly to look for examples of filename duplication -- nor am I familiar enough with the recovery software to know if there is a mechanism that would prevent filename duplication. As I'm in a bit of a rush to finish this restoration, I'm going to assume there are duplicates. I have room to store the original restored files for a while, so if it's difficult to test the accuracy of the finished batch the owner won't be out anything -- but he'll at least have (hopefully) a large percentage of his files available for review.
I would REALLY appreciate help in either creating a batch file that could search for a specific filetype, list the results, and rename duplicates (perhaps in a serial fashion?). Or, of that's too complicated or impossible, perhaps a batch that could find duplicate filenames and list the paths so I could more easily rename them manually? (Sorry -- I am so tired right now that I can't even think of hypothetical batch filtering mechanisms that might make the goal easier to achieve... I hope this makes sense.) Thanks very much for your help. mcaren
