sony hdd sr30 recover deleted videos - testdisk

So anyway, when hiking up Errigal with Daire and Conor and Casey I made some videos. And ran out of space on the HDD. Wayyy back in the spring when we burned DVDs of everything in camera we didn't format the HDD and clear everything off as we were using the camera to show people the vids. Since then on occasion we have to manually clear out older videos to make space. You can delete video by video or "delete date" or "delete all". Now the wind was blowing quite hard, we were on the steepest bit and the lads were getting a bit ahead of me and somehow "DELETE ALL" was hit.
Excellent interface by the way sony HDD DCR-SR30 otherwise but no "are you sure you want to delete ALL your videos you eejit?" on the "delete all" option. Wahh! OFF! OFF! Nope no off so I clicked off the battery.
Battery back in and after a period of "recovering disk - do not vibrate camera" (while smoothly running up Errigal!) something seemed to be left. One date left besides Errigal (didn't notice it was only one date at the time. I legged it to catch up with the boys so at least if they got blown off down the steep side of the mountain I could tell their parents I saw them (AND maybe even get a video of it!!!!)

Now at home I see AUGH! We've lost a couple of months :(

http://www.google.ie/search?q=sony+hdd+recover+deleted+videos
Lots of stuff but maybe unreliable, costs money.
But then I see a reference to testdisk. (with a good report of other options tried)
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=5857136
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

http://www.google.ie/search?q=sony+hdd+partition+type+testdisk
testdisk docs: it detects type automatically => intel

Excellent, open source and free and yes :) browser showing deleted files, can copy them off at least.

Now first to burn CD of existing videos.
Two bum CDs now though !? wtf?
... http://www.ainotenshi.org/2008/07/10/infrarecorder-free-open-source-cddvd-burning-solution-for-windows/
http://infrarecorder.sourceforge.net/
Hmmm. Well testdisk can recover the dvd files ...
InfraRecord "fixating" the disk seems to do the trick.
... or ... ? The 1st corrupt CD is now magically ... not ... corrupt?
Hmfff.


Waiting for this ....

PhotoRec 6.10, Data Recovery Utility, July 2008
Christophe GRENIER 
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sdc - 30 GB / 27 GiB (RO) - Sony Camcorder
     Partition                  Start        End    Size in sectors
 1 P FAT32 LBA                0   1  1  3647 252 61   58604929 [NO NAME]


Pass 1 - Reading sector   12730626/58604929, 1 files found
Elapsed time 0h03m33s - Estimated time for achievement 0h12m47
mpg: 1 recovered

EDIT: testdisk rocks! :)
Sony HDD disk is familiar FAT32 and just copied manually testdisk deleted videos to PC. A few were corrupt but recovered months and months (>2 DVDs worth). whew!