Error: File just captured could not be read and was deleted after capture.

Question

I was just recording an extremely important interview. I have recorded literally 10.000 recordings before with the same setup, every day, over a period of some three years now. I'm recorging DV PAL through SDI input on a AJA KONA LS card.
It seemed to be going well last night while recording but as soon as I pressed 'Esc' to end the capture I got an error message saying (not exactly in these words) : Error: The file just captured could not be read.
The file couldn't be found anywhere on the HD or in the trash. Usually when something goes wrong during capture, you can find the file in the capture folder named 'filename-av'. Not this time, I have never seen this error message before.
The person being interviewed was absolutely furious and said he would not do the interview again. So I'm up against the wall here, and need to recover the files.
What's more, the problem still persists. When I try capturing again, as soon as I stop the same error occurs. So now my FCP is not capturing anymore
I tried running Data Rescue 3.1 and found the recording in deleted files, but:
1. the recording is in several parts (not sure if it's all there, but probably most of it)
2. Data Rescue 3 interprets the files as .dv files, as opposed to .mov files as all my other recorded material.
3. THERE IS NO AUDIO IN THE .DV FILES, which pretty much nullifies the file recovery altogether.
I tried googling this error, but it did not help much:
1. None of the people were capturing the same way I do (most were capturing from tape, none straight through KONA SDI input)
2. There was no solution to prevent the error.
3. No solution to recover the files either.
I must say, this experience really taught me the essence of Murphy's law: 'Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong at the worst possible moment'
Any suggestions as to the reasons for this?
Any suggestions as to how the files can be recovered?

Answer 1

Good news!
I beleive I have found the cause and solution.   At least now I am able to reproduce the problem at will and therefore, hopefully prevent it.
I discovered that there is nothing wrong with my AJA KONA setup, as I was able to capture with both QuickTime movie capture and Adobe Premier just fine.  But every time I try capturing in FCP I get unreadable capture files (since 2 days ago).
Trying all possible capture settings, capture presets or easy setups did nothing.  (although capturing thru Firewire still works every time).
I was about to give up when I noticed that where I usually have my video scopes window running, for convenience sake, under it the Voiceover utility was running.
So here is the deal:  Usually when you try and capture with the Voiceover utility running, you can't. FCP wont allow you to capture, it will return an error message saying: 'Log and capture can not be opened while Voice Over is running. Please close Voice Over and try again.'  As it turns out, this warning is probably for a good reason.
BUT...
If you shut down FCP with Voice Over running and start it up again THEN you CAN run Log and Capture at the same time... everything looks OK, until you stop the recordin, then you get an error message saying your recording is screwed.
I tried this over and over again,  every time it behaves the same way.  Shutting down with VO util>starting up again>recordings get screwed  .. close VO utility>back to normal operation.
I'm not sure if it was the VO utility the last time this happened (few weeks back), but it might very well be.  I might not have noticed that the VO utility was running as it was hidden behind the videoscopes and there are no warnings when running Log and Capture if you start up FCP with VO utility still running.
My educated guess to what is going on is that the VO utility is taking up priority over the sound inputs and by doing so making the audio of the capture unreadable.  This theory is supported by the fact that when my data recovering experts found the recordings on the HD, there was no audio on the files, but the video was intact.
The only reason setting up the AJA drivers helped in the past was probably because that flushed the FCP settings and in doing so closed the VO utility window. How very ironic
Hope this helps someone out there. And I hope Apple find a way to prevent this from happening.
cheers!
Vidar F.