newbe questions

[lmccarty]

I am in the process of creating a new position for myself and I am trying various data recovery applications, so I am running the demo version.
I recovered some deleted files from a 2Gb memory stick, the files were screen shot from a users computer, when I attempted to open them in WordPad, all I get is square O's and then a number or letter, nothing usable.
Did I do something wrong or is it just because I am using the demo version.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

As far as recovery is concerned, there is no difference between demo and full. So, there are the following possibilities, in arbitrary order:

1. There were too few items on the stick. You need at least three directories and five to ten files of known type on the volume for the recovery to work. Any less and it may fail to establish the proper patterns/parameters.
2. The files were overwritten (so there is actually nothing to recover).
3. You did something wrong (not likely; typically it requires massive fiddling with settings to make the recovery fail).