Attempting to recover a formatted drive.

[Sayaka]

Hi

I am currently recovering a formatted drive using Recover My Files. The drive is a 500GB Western Digital. It has searched the drive, found the files, then moved onto analysing file system fragments. This is taking an extremely long time, and by extremely long i mean this is day 12 :P. The bar is maybe around 10% with no signs of speeding up. Any ideas of the reason for this or any way to speed up the process?

Thanks.

[GDH]

Hi,

How many files were found? If there were a lot (e.g. 100,000) then it could slow this part down.

Is it possible that the external drive has gone to sleep? Can you still see the light flashing and hear the drive spinning?

It may be better to kill this search and start fresh. If you follow these instrucitons: http://forums.getdata.com/computer-d...ard-drive.html then you should get the files back within a few hours.

[Sayaka]

Well it's found 900,000 files so that could definately be it :P. The drive is definately still going, and it goes through 10 fragments every 15-20 minutes, currently at 34000. The way i set it up is the exact way the guide says though i just read:

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.

If i stop it, will it properly rebuild the folder structure now? If so, whats the point in analysing file system fragments?

Thanks

[GDH]

In the progress window there are two numbers:

Files Found = xxx?
OS Items found = xxx?

What were / are these numbers?

[Sayaka]

Files Found: 901520
O/S Items Found: 961463

The numbers have been the same since it started analysing the file system fragments

[GDH]

Hi,

It looks like the reason it is going so slow is due to the volume of "Files Found".

That is a lot of files found - did you only use the default file selection? As per the instructions here: http://forums.getdata.com/computer-d...ard-drive.html

If for some reason you need to run this search again, let the Files Found number go up to 5000, then, whilst the search is in progress, click on OPTIONS > FILE TYPES, and take all the ticks out of the selected file types. Then just let it find the OS Items, and after the OS items stops going up you can stop the search.

[Sayaka]

Ok i've restarted the search, cancelled all files types at 5000 O/S items and its going good so far. 40,000 after 12 minutes so hopefully that should allow it to analyse faster. Thanks and ill post an update when it gets there

[GDH]

Whoops - just realized that I typed the wrong thing (i have edited it now). I meant to say, "let the Files Found number go to 5000...."

However, you should still be ok in your search - if it is finding lots of OS Items, then that is a good thing.

[Sayaka]

Well when i stopped it at 5000 O/S files the Files found was at 4500 so not much difference. The search worked, it finished fairly quickly and all the files were pulled through. But now i have a new problem :P

So i saved all the files by ticking Recovered NTFS Partition 1 in the folder view so it would take everything. But after it finished pulling it all, none of the files are working. If i save files through the file type view, all of them work but are not filed, ordered or in folders. Anything i can do about this?

Thanks

[GDH]

The files found in "File Type View" which are called names like "Recovered_FileType_1" are found by locating the header and footer of the file.

The files found in "Folder View" are found by locating the partition index (the Master File Table) at the start of the disk. An MFT record for a file contains the file and folder name, and identifies the clusters that the data for a file occupies on the disk. Your problem is that the MFT table that has been found is corrupt and the MFT entries are not pointing to the correct data locations.

There is one more search you could try. Run a Complete Format Recover on the physical drive and search only for JPEG and BMP files. This should find enough files to assist the program to all the available MFT records, but not overload and slow down the process by finding to many files. Hopefully then you will be able to find the file and folder names in Folder View and be able to preview and save the files properly.