NTFS to RAW

[petey]

Hi, and thanks so much for this product. I've actually already done a "fast format recover" and was able to retrieve ~50,000 mp3 files from my external hard drive in addition to several other files. After saving my recovered data to another disk, I was about to reformat the old one when I thought, to be safe, I'd run a "complete format recover". That process is roughly 25% complete and showing 88,000 o/s items found so far. When I did my initial "fast" recover, the final result was that 81,492 files were found.

My question is...what are o/s items, and is it possible that I may be able to recover yet even more files using the "complete format recover" option?

Thanks for any advice you might offer, and again, thank-you very much for making this program available.

[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.

[petey]

Thank-you for the information, GDH, I had searched the homepage, forum and helpfile but couldn't find the explanation you just offered--it's very enlightening, and good to know for future reference since, scanning the forum, it seems HDD's converting to RAW is not an uncommon experience and I may need your software again in the future.

I only asked about possibly recovering more files because I'm not exactly sure how many files I had on my hard drive. This morning I awoke after having let RMC run all night in complete recover mode and the final result is that 103,300 files were found vs. the 81,000 found in the fast recovery mode, which is not insignificant. Do you still think it's probable that the results won't be much different? (sorry, I really am not so sophisticated when it comes to these things)