Corrupted thumb drive is now 2200+ .chk files, what's the best recovery option?

[Kabob]

My wife's thumb drive that has lots of her work documents (powerpoints and whatnot) was somehow corrupted and has turned all of her documents into 2200 "FILE***.chk" files. What's the best way to recover this data?

I made a copy of the bad files and tried using a freeware recovery program but it missed probably 60% of the files.

Any ideas?

 

[PTNL]

You can give some of the products from DiskInternals a shot -- the demo will let you know what it can actually recover. Other than that, you're either looking at an offsite data recovery company or simply accept your losses and the few uncorrupted files that you can still copy to something else.

Now would also be a good opportunity for her to talk with her work's IT team about what she can do to backup data and/or use an offsite backup option (ie: Carbonite, etc.).

 

[Snowknight26]

Though I'm sure there's a program that will do this automatically, if you check the first few bytes of each file you should be able to tell what kind of file it is and rename it appropriately.

Few examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures