Problems with Results disappearing

[steve]

Hello,

I'm attempting to recover a 1TB drive thats been formatted (possibly multiple times). I'm running V4.0.0 (380) slow File recovery on both XP and Vista. Initially, the recovery finds files and I'm able to see them in the preview, but after a few million blocks of scan (of 1.9B total), the ability to preview the files goes away and the hex preview shows the files as empty. The properties information that was there for items like XLS files, is also gone although the modified and creation dates look accurate. It appears that this happens near or at the same point where the system event logs starts showing errors reading thousands of bad blocks.

I know the data is there, but I just can't hold onto it. Any guidance?

Thanks in advance.

[GDH]

Hi Steve,

Is it possible that the drive is going into sleep mode at about the same point? This could cause the behavior you describe. Please check the power settings in the control panel.

If this is not it, please click the live support button in top right hand corner of this page so that I can chat with you about other possible solutions.

Thank you.

[steve]

I checked and it was set to 20minutes for Hard drives, although I don't believe the drive went to sleep, I have set that to "never". I'm restarting the scan for a 300,000,000 block range in the middle of the disk (past where the block issues were reported) to see if that does anything. So far I have 13 tax files with preview showing hex content and no bad blocks reported, so I'll watch it and post results.

Thanks

[steve]

The recovery made it to 140M of 300M blocks (nearly 24 hours) and found ~700 files before the same behavior. Up to this point I did see disk activity in term of the flickering light on the USB cabinet and all the previews had content, but about the time the disk activity light stopped, I started getting block errors at the OS level and all previews are now empty.

The progress bar is still reporting blocks scanning is ongoing, but I don't believe that is accurate at this point. I can see the drive through explorer and get properties, etc. and through disk management is states "healthy" It appears to be spinning from listening to it and occasionally the access light flickers, but its not flickering consistent with the previous activity noted when RMF was scanning.

Thanks

Steve

[GDH]

Hi,

It is odd behavior.

Probably your best chance it so use the OPTIONS > ADVANCED > PROMPT FOR START SECTOR setting to scan the disk in segments.

The only other thing that I would suggest is to try and use forensic software such as EnCase of FTK to take a sector image of the drive - whilst they may not be able to read the bad bits, they could produce a working image that blanks out the bits that cannot be read.

[steve]

I'm at the point of breaking it up into small c*****. To eliminate the PC or the USB enclosure, I installed in into an XP machine via SATA and restarted the scan for the first 500M blocks. The odd thing was that it ran for 6 hours then the progress stopped and I got message about unable to complete a delayed write to the $MFT on that drive. It looks like the system effectively hung waiting on the write, but I'm not sure what program was trying to write to it.

I also am having the issue related to lost files that have no end, e.g. Turbotax files all are 1.0M and Quicken files are all 10M. I've set the limit on lost files to 25M but it doesn't seem to change anything. Am I missing something?

Thanks

Steve