19 videos corrupted after Ctrl+X (MTP) from Honor 200 Pro to Windows - originals deleted, copied files became 42GB-46GB of zeros. Any recovery possible?
I'm hoping someone with Android/MTP or data recovery experience can help.
Phone: Honor 200 Pro (internal storage)
PC: Windows 11
Transfer method: USB MTP (File Transfer mode)
What happened:
- I had 82 MP4 videos in:
Internal shared storage/DCIM/ - All videos played normally on the phone.
- I selected all of them in Windows Explorer and used Ctrl+X (Cut).
- I pasted them onto my SSD.
- 63 videos transferred correctly.
- 19 videos became corrupted.
- The originals disappeared from the phone.
The corrupted files have very strange behavior:
- Explorer reports sizes around 46 GB (impossible; they should have been a few hundred MB each).
- "Size on disk" is only 8 KB.
- Copying the file tries to copy the full 46 GB.
- VLC cannot play them.
- FFmpeg reports:
​
moov atom not found
Invalid data found when processing input
What I've already checked:
fsutil file queryextentscertutil -dumpcertutil -hashfile- HxD hex editor
- FFmpeg / FFprobe
- ADB
Findings:
- Beginning of the file is all
00. - No
ftyp. - No
mdat. - No
moov. - I found
stscandco64atoms near the end of the file. - The
co64chunk offsets all point to locations that contain only00. - Searching for H.264/H.265 start codes found nothing.
- ADB confirms
/sdcard/DCIM/is now empty. find /sdcard -iname "*.mp4"returns nothing.
The phone has barely been used since this happened.
Question:
- Does this look like a known MTP Cut/Move failure?
- Is there any possibility the actual video data still exists on the phone even though the directory is empty?
- Is there anything else I should try before sending the phone to a forensic recovery lab?
Any advice from people experienced with Android storage, MTP, or forensic recovery would be greatly appreciated.