[Mike]

My laptop hard drive crashed a while back. I put the disk in a usb drive enclosure and am running RMF to recover files. I'm doing a Complete Format Recovery. When first started, it moves along quite quickly with the scan, then it slows down quite a bit. I suspect it is hitting some disk errors and gets hung on I/Os. (The drive has some serious problems. I avoid the My Computer window, because it just hangs forever.) RMF only responds (screen updates) once every few minutes.

Search Progress currently shows:
Files Found: 3351
O/S Items Found 235,630
Time Elapsed: 16:14:36

At the current rate, it would take 244 days to complete. I left this running previously for 7+ days over the holidays, and it got further, but still hundreds of days remaining.

My question is this. When I click on "Stop" button on the Search Progress window, it will stop doing something, and continue. What are the consequences of doing this? I find that the search continues on, and I am able to get to search results and restore files. Does clicking "Stop" cause fewer files to show up in the search results? Does clicking "Stop" affect the ability to save files that do show up in the search results?

Thanks,
Mike