Hi,
Question 1 - Should I search Physical or Drive Letter?
A
Physical Drive is the actual physical hard drive that you have located in your computer. As you know, a Physical Drive can be partitioned in to one or more
Logical Drives which are represented by drive letters.
The primary reason for giving the option to search the Physical Drive is that if you have lost your drive letter and Windows no longer sees the partition/s then in order to search the drive the only option is to get physical drive access. In this case Recover My Files just looks at the physical drive as one big chunk of raw data and searches from the very beginning of the drive to the very end.
In your situation, you quick formatted the drive (
For others reading this post - if you have lost your partition, don't format the drive as it actually makes recovery more difficult). Now, Recover My Files is able to see the drive letter as well as the Physical Drive. I presume you just made 1 big partition that covers the entire size of the drive?
The things to consider in selecting whether to search physical or logical are:
- If you made the new partition smaller than the original, then by searching the drive letter you would will miss some of the old drive data (it would be better to search the physical in this case);
- If you had reinstalled Windows or other software to the drive to the drive, then there would be no point including this data in the search because i) the files are not missing, and ii) it would make the search go longer. In this case it would be better to search the logical drive as Recover My Files will only look a the deleted areas of the new partition.
In your case - you can search physical or logical, because you have created a new drive letter which is the entire length of the physical drive and you have not installed any new files onto the drive.
Question 2 -
How many file types should I select in a Complete Format Recover?
When you are recovering from a Formatted Drive and are running a Complete Format Recover, in 95% of cases you should search ONLY for the default selected file types - .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .xls, .doc, .avi, .wav, .ppt, .zip.
ONLY add more file types if you know that you do not have any of the above file types on the drive. Adding extra file types is not required and can slow down the search.
Only every include music or video file types if these were the ONLY file types on your disk.
You will be happy to know that in Version 4 of the program which will be released soon we have taken all these user selection decisions out of the program :-)..
Question 3 -
What are OS Items?
At the start of you disk is a table called the Master File Table or MFT. This table contains a list of all files and folders on your computer. Each file has an "MFT record". Amongst other things, the MFT record for a file holds the name of that file and points to the storage location of the file on the hard disk.
OS items (Operating System items) are MFT records. The more OS items found the better, as each one represents that you will recover a file with the full file name and folder structure intact.
The way that RMF works is that it searches for the default selected file types by searching over the disk for their unique file structure - eg. the header and footer of that file type. When it finds a file, it does not know the name because the name is stored in the MFT record, which is why in File Type View whilst the search is in progress you see files with names like "Recovered_JPEG_1". However the program can use the files to identify the location of all MFT records (OS items), find them, and rebuild the entire file and folder structure (not just the selected file types. The complete file and folder structure is not rebuilt until the end of the search.
From the search results you have indicated so far Recover My Files will recover all you files with full file and folder names intact. All you need to do now is be patient. :-)
I hope this helps.