Why does RMF hang at 90%?!!!!!!!!

[Son2022]

A friend of mine accidently formatted my hard drive while i was on holiday . When i got back i got RMF when it was recommended by another friend, and followed the instructions for format revcovery.

The first time i ran it with only the default settings and it ran the search upto about 90% complete. At this point the program stop responding, the little box said it was analysing some number (cluster i think), it did not respond for about 5 minutes then my system restarted ( i think it probably blue-screened first but i didn't see it). I have tried re-running RMF about 6 times then i tried scandisk to fix any problems or bad sectors, i ran it again but it still crashed.

What is wrong here ? and can i still recover most of my files if only 90% of the disc is scanned? Any help would be much appreciated as i have about 2 years of holiday snaps, music collecting, movies and documents that i really dont want to lose .

Thanks a lot, Sonny.

[GDH]

Firstly, please make sure you are using the latest avaialbe version of Recover My Files - version 3.73, available from www.recovermyfiles.com.

If you get at consistent problem with this version at the end of the disk then there is something very nasty happening there.

Please run a "Complete Format Recover" for the default file types up to 85% of the disk. Then stop the search and the program will rebuild all of the old partition that it has found up until this time.

Please let me know how this goes and I will give you further instructions.

Please do not run checkdisk any more.

Thanks

[Son2022]

i did what u said, stopped before it stalled, now i can see a huge jumble of files but i dont know how to save them, when i click the save button it says to save it to a different drive but i dont have any other drive big enough. My disk is partitioned into a 5.59gb C drive and a 110gb D drive, the D drive got windows reinstalled on it by norton ghost.

Is there any way to save the files i have now located back onto D drive? i dont have access to external drives and have no idea how much data i have recovered and probably dont have that many cd-rw or cd-r.

Also i had a large number of avi, mp3, mpeg multimedia that i did not search for, will these have been recovered by this search or do i have to search seperately for them? One last question are all my programs lost or can they too be recovered?

thanks a lot
hope you reply soon
sonny

[GDH]

In the results screen you should be able to look in "Folder View" and find your most important files - including your multimedia files. Because of the Windows installation you may have lost some of your original folder names but the file names should be intact.

You cannot save files back to the same drive, or you would be overwriting and destroying the files that you want to recover.

Go and buy a box of CDs - they are very cheap - and save the files directly to CD (or DVD). Once you have saved everything you want you can copy them back to your drive.

[Son2022]

thanks a lot, i've just ordered a dvd writer and a backup harddrive so that i can keep archiving my collection without having to go through this ordeal again.

recover my files has really helped a lot, from the point when i thought i had lost everything to now having the peices i need to rebuild my Personal computer I could never have done it without your help, thanks Graham.

Sonny