unrecoverable files

[perseus]

hello,

new to forum.

just recently completed two weeks of trying to recover the contents of an external hard drive which suddenly went unallocated. tried every option available on 'recover my files' final option was full formatt recovery, it took 31 hrs. but it still did not recover some important text files. to be accurate the message said that 143 files were unrecoverable

i used another recovery software and it had no problem recovering everyhthing and in less that 7 hrs.

anyone got any suggestions as to why it took so long and was unable to recover all files especially text files? and this other programme found the lot and recovered them successfully.

thanks.

[GDH]

A search should never take this long to run. In almost all situations you should be able to get all data back in less than 4 hours. If another program was able to recover specific files, then it should be easy for Recover My Files to find it.

[perseus]

hello,

may be the size of the hard drive and pc might have a bearing on it; 750gb external hard drive, e6750 intel core 2 duo processor and 2gb ram on my pc.

i also did not set recovermyfiles to search for deleted files, purely because they were not, and on the assumption that this would speed the search up.

does this shed some light on the situation? or do certain settings need to be made before starting the search.

as to the missing files, it did'nt locate them on any type of search. (the files in question are notepad files)

thanks.

[GDH]

Hi,

Run the following Search with Recover My Files:

Please make sure you are running the latest version of Recover My Files which is 3.9.8.6081.

You can download it from http://www.recovermyfiles.com or by using this link: http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe; or if you already have the program installed you can press the UPDATE button on the tool bar of the main program screen.

Run the program:

1. Select "Complete Format Recover" from the first wizard menu. Click "Next";

2. In the drive selection window, select and search the "physical" hard drive (a physical drive is actual physical hard drive inside your PC).

If you have two hard drives connected to your PC (e.g. an internal drive and an external drive), you will see two "physical" drives listed. Your C: usually resides on "0physical". You should be able to tell which physical drive you wish to search by the displayed size.

Place a tick in the box next to the physical drive that you wish to search, then click Next.

3. In the File Type Selection window, search ONLY for the default selected files types: .doc, .xls, .ppt, .bmp, .jpeg, .avi, .pdf, .wav. This file type selection is optimized to enable Recover My Files to locate the "Master File Table" (MFT), which contains the name and location of all files on your disk. Once this table is found, ALL file types will be recovered.

4. Start the search.

5. In the progress window you will see "Files Found = xxx" and "OS Items Found = xxx". When the Master File Table is located, the "OS Items Found" number will increase very quickly to a very high number. Each OS Item Found represents a file with its full file and folder name. The average hard drive has between 75,000 and 200,000 files on it.

6. When the OS Items Found number reaches a very high number, stops increasing, and remains constant, you can press the STOP button (on your average home PC you should reach this point within 2 hours of searching). The search will STOP, the results will build and display in "Folder View" of the results screen.

7. In the top left hand window of the Folder View results screen you should see your old folder structure. Start at the bottom of the folder list as this is usually where the most relevant folders are. Expand the folders with the + sign next to them and look for relevant files.

Folders with a Red X mean that the folder name was destroyed. However sub files and folders will still be ok, so also search these folders for relevant files.

8. In the right hand top window of the results screen, click on the files found to preview their content in the bottom preview window.

When you find what you are looking for, put a tick next to the file or folder to mark it to be saved (you can see the total number and volume of files selected in the bottom bar of the main program screen). To select groups of files, hold down the SHIFT or CTRL key, hilight the files with your mouse, and then press the SPACE BAR to turn the ticks on (or off).

9. Press the SAVE FILES button to save the files. You must purchase and enter a product activation key into the program before you can save files. Files MUST be saved to another drive, which can be a hard drive, usb, CD, DVD, or Network drive.

If the "Complete Format Recover" does not work for you, the next type of search to try is a "Complete File Search" of the drive letter, for your specific file type.

[perseus]

hello,

thanks for prompt reply.

did as you have advised on previous searches, except, i allowed the search to continue to the very last bit of the hard drive. was worried that there might be something near the end. over cautious?

Any ideas why it was unable to retrieve the previously mentioned files?

thanks.

[GDH]

In your last search, did you recover all other files? an just not these Text files?

[perseus]

no, there were many files not recovered. some programme files, text files, various. it was the other programme that alerted me to this. approximately 3.5 gb of missing files

what they were i cant remember. except that recover my filessaid that it was unable to recover 143 files.

some of the files in question could have been these text files.

i have since reformatted the offending hard drive and put all the retrieved data back on it, pretty much as it was, but htis was only possible using another recovery programme. and had i not double checked it would have run into problems with some of the recovered software not working due to missing files.

I compared the two recovered partitions one at 103gb 'recover my files' and the other programme was 108gb.

hope this information helps.

I could always try another scan and see what happens, but form your previous posts there are no settings to change to enable a more thorough scan.