How accurate is 976773168?

[tarheel_g]

I am running a complete format recovery. It shows I have progressed to about 8000000 of 976773168 and the program has been running for 14 hours.

Does this mean I will need to let this run 71 more days!?!?!?!!?

This is a 500GB HDD we are trying to recover and it had only about half of it filled.

Is there an end in sight?

[GDH]

A Complete Format Recover will run slowly due to the following reasons:

• The drive in question has bad sectors
• The problem drive has a slow connection - e.g. a USB1 connection is almost 3 times slower than a USB2 connection
• You selected more than the default file types (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .avi, .wav, .pdf, .zip). You don't ususally need to select more file types, selecting these files will still enable the program to rebuild the entire file and folder structure at the end of the search.

In many situations you do not need to search the entire disk.

When running a Complete Format Recover you should see the following values in the progress window:

Files Found = XXX
OS Items Found = XXX

Files Found
This means that Recover My Files has found one of the file types you selected in the search. During the search you will notice that the "Files Found" are displayed in "File View" of the main program screen. i.e., in the top left hand window of the main program screen, it will list "Word (xx)". If you click on "Word (xx)" it will display the list of found files in the right hand window, and you can click on these to preview them. Note however that these files do not have their original names (read on!)

OS Items Found
An OS Item represents a file with its full file and folder name. If you are running a Complete Format Recover then the more OS Items found the better, as it means that at the end of the search you will get your full file and folder structure back.

What you can do now to hurry the search
If "Files Found" is greater than 2000, and OS Items is a large number that has stopped increasing for some time, then you have already found sufficient information to rebuild the missing file system. You can now press the STOP button in the progress window once ("are you sure you want to stop the search?" = yes) and then Recover My Files will enter into the process of rebuilding the file system.

Or,

If the reason the search is running very slowly is due to the fact that you have selected multiple additional file types, then whilst the search is in progress, click on the OPTIONS button and go to the FILE TYPES tab and take the tick out of all the selected file types. This will give RMF the ability to scan the rest of the disk looking for more OS Items, but not waste time on processing more files found.

I hope this makes sense.

[tarheel_g]

Yes that was helpful. I could have done that 12 hours ago....

Now, I am just waiting on the "analysing file system fragment" process. I am about 15% through that process. Is this something I can also cancel?

I stopped the recovery process earlier with 134677 files found and 1057710 o/s items found. I am currently on 82610 fragment number. Does it have to go all the way to 1057710?

[GDH]

Yes - you should leave the "analyzing file system fragments" run to the end.

How is the progress now?

[tarheel_g]

It is at 137770. Based on the progress bar, its about 20% through. Thats after almost 12 hours.

Is this taking so long because of the drive size, or the amount of files and o/s files found? I remember it found several thousand files and o/s items pretty quickly. Would it be quicker to simply restart the whole process and only let it find 2-3 thousand files?

[GDH]

Yes, stop the current search. Check Folder View of the results screen for any relevant files, and save any that are important.

Now close the program and restart it.
Now start a new search.

• Run a Complete Format Recover
• Select the "physical drive" only - you should be able to tell which one the problem drive is by the size
• In the file selection window, search ONLY for the default selected file types (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .avi, .wav, .jpeg, .pdf, .zip)

In the progress window; when "Files Found = 5000" move it to one side, then click on the OPTIONS button on the main program screen, and take ALL the ticks out of ALL the file types. Click OK and the search will continue and should keep finding OS Items. When OS items stabilizes, stop the search and let the file and folder structure rebuild.

[tarheel_g]

Ok this is working now.

I have noticed that not all the files in each folder are found. Is that because they are just no longer there, or because I only allowed it to search for a finite period of time?

[GDH]

It could be both reasons.

Once you have recovered all your current files, in order to be certain that you have found all possible "OS Items", then you should run another search and let it go to the end of the disk.

If you are still missing some files it means that an OS Item (MFT record) was not found for the file. It still may be possible to find the file but as the original file and folder name is contained only in the MFT record the file and folder name would be lost.