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. mcarenSome restore programs restore the directory names and full filenames.

When you do this kind of thing then cloning the HDD allows you to try the recovery on a copy of the drive and you can try different software - on the copied drive.

You can get further help - but you need to describe a scheme of sorting the files.

Duplicate filenames can have a number appended to the name.

How about How to create a file sorter? It's one of my threads. Just scroll down to the bottom. I didn't really get it at first..