[GDH]

A "Fast Format Recover" scans the drive and looks for valid partition information. If it finds a valid parition table it reads in the whole table and rebuilds the file system. This is why a Fast Format Recover is fast.

Part of the partition information on a drive is the Master File Table. The MFT is like a spreadsheet which contains the name and folder location of every file on your PC and identifies the hard disk storage clusters which contain a files data.

When you run a "Complete Format Recover" you are searching for individual MFT records. Each MFT record found is an "OS item" (Operating System item) and represents a single file on your PC.

In some data recover situation the Partition information is screwed (so a Fast Format Recover wont work) but individual MFT records can still be located. In this situation a Complete Format Recover will get your data back.

It sounds in your situation like the partition table could still be read without any problems. There probably won't be any diffference in the search results.