Stellar Phoenix Issues

Hi to the forum - this is my first post here, and some help would be gratefully appreciated.

I had an issue with an external Iomega HD, it suddenly became unrecognizable to my MacBook, and so i looked into methods of data recovery, opting for Stellar Phoenix.

After about 3 days of scanning the drive (its a 2TB drive), it found about 300gb of files - slightly less than i think i had, but not far off.

The problem Im having is that when i choose to recover the data, the files are largely un-readable. .mov files wont open, .jpeg files are corrupt, .mp4 files wont read...etc etc.

I made one error on my road to recovery that i believe is probably causing this - in blind stress and panic, I partitioned my drive into 1 volume, following instructions i read somewhere else on this forum so it was set up correctly for my MacBook - but completely forgot that this impacts on your ability to recover data.

Does anyone with Stellar experience and knowledge know whether this problem of not being able to read files is common place, or whether it is likely to to my partitioning error, prior to recovery? Are there any solutions to make the files useable again?

Thanks in advance for any help or guidance.

See post #11 (same subject - no guarantee it's the same issue, just thought it might interest you):
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/59847-recover-deleted-files.html#post1023863

I don't agree that Stellar is rubbish. It saved me a bundle of headaches by recovering hundreds of valuable photos from a dead drive. A lot has to do with what condition the data is in when trying to recover it.

To the OP:

You probably jeopardized recovering your data by partitioning the drive. Whenever a drive is written to or partitioned after data is lost, it makes matters worse. Partitioning is especially bad since it not only destroys data by moving partition boundaries, it also moves data so that it's not where it's expected to be.

Regards.

Thanks for your reply - i feared that to be the case. Ah well - lesson learned as they say.