Couple Of Questions...

[Glenn71x]

I had my hard drive crash. Windows says the drive is not formatted. I stuck it in my other machine as a slave and ran this software. Took about 8 hours and I used format recover option. Results were great, Found almost all of my files, and the full directory structure and filenames were al intact. Anyway after a few hours of saving these files slowly across to a network drive, the program basically locked up. Now I had to reboot my system. There is no way to go back to the results of the search without having to rerun another 8 hour search? This time I just tried a Complete search, not the format recover. The results were not the same. There were no directory structures or filename. Evrything was just named recovered jpg.....etc. Will I get the directory type results using the format recover again? Making sense out of these new results is very difficult. Evrything was perfect the first time with format recover. What is the difference in these searches? Thanks

[GDH]

Hi,

A Format Recover and a Complete Search use two different techniques, which is why you have different results.

At the start of your hard drive is a table called the Master File Table, or MFT. This table contains all the file name and folder information that relate to your files. Within each MFT record is as address on the disk where the file starts, so the computer can read the table and then know where to go and find the file on the disk. When you format your drive, the MFT is deleted. A "Format Recover" search goes out and finds these deleted MFT record, rebuilds them, and displays the files with full file name and path.

To speed up a Format Recover search, search for just .avi and .bmp files. These are good files because there are usually lots of them on most systems, they are small files, and have a unique file structure that can be easily identified. At the end of the search you will still get all your files back.

What happens when the MFT records are totally destoryed? Most most data recovery software programs only rely on MFT records, so if they are destroyed then your data is lost. However, in a Complete Search, Recover My Files does a full disk scan of your drive looking to recognise deleted files by their file structure (header, footer etc.). If it is possible to work out the file name then it does, however it is much more difficult on a formatted disk to go back and find the relevant deleted MFT record that contains the file name and folder information. If Recover My Files is not able to do this then it names the file "Recovered_Filename_1".

I hope this helps.

[Glenn71x]

Yes that explains it perfectly. But in reference to the first part of my question...Is it possible to save the results of the search so that if you have to close Recover My Files for some reason,you can just go back to the results without having to totally research?

[Glenn71x]

Ugggh It happened again... After a nice 7 hour scan Im back to seeing my files perfectly in directory structure. The one file I guess is in bad shape or something when I go to save it The computer starts to crawl....like 15 mins later and not even half the file has been saved. So i Try to cancel the save of that file and when it eventually does cancel, the computer is now totally crawling...If I click something it takes about 60 seconds to respond then it barely moves, I cant search through the directories because it barely moves, so no once again I am faced with having to reboot the machine but losing all my results ans haveing to do another 8 hour scan. This seems flawed to me. Cant I just go back to the previous scans results without having to rescan from scratch??

[GDH]

We have not encountered this problem before. We will have a look at the saving routine and see if we can isolate the issue. Can you tell from the event log which file is giving you the problems? Do you think that the disk may have bad sectors?

It is not currently possible to save a re-load search results. This is a feature that we plan to include in the future.

[Glenn71x]

Im not sure what the disk has, bad sectors is definitely a possibility. According to Power Max software the drive is toasted, maxtor is issuing me a replacement drive. I am just trying to rescue as much as I can before sending back to maxtor. Most of the files I was saving on the drive are .avi files. So it is most likely one or more of these causing this extreme slowing down issue.

[GDH]

If it gets stuck again see if you can work out from the event log what it gets stuck on. Is there any chance that any of the files you are recovering are NTFS compressed?

[Glenn71x]

Definitely not compressed. There were errors in the event log though, cluster reading errors I think?

[Brett Hunter]

Hi,
I think the problem is the larger number of bad clusters. If there are too many the drive will continually try reading and aborting. It might be best to image your drive before you send it back to Maxtor - this way you can at your leisure recover your files, and have no annoying bad cluster problems either. Contact me directly on brett@getdata.com to more info on this.