Drive searching - Logical or Physical?

[Quince]

Hey!

The situation:

I hooked up my external HD to a PC, but found out this PC has a habit of distroying partitions...
I have an External 300GB Firewire/USB Maxtor disk, and after working fine for a couple of hours, it simply wouldn't read the partition anymore...

Running Windows disk manager said the disk didn't have any partition information, and asked if i'd like to partition it.

Now this was before I tried Recover my Files so I thought, not having it partitioned won't get me anywhere, so let's partition it first (doing a fast format)
knowing it wouldn't acually delete any of my files, merely clearing the whole indexing part...

So off I went to search for a recovery program, found Recover my Files, read some positive 'reviews' and figured i'd give it a shot...
Bummer I found out only then that by re-partitioning my drive I kind of screwed up the option to simply do a fast format recover and be done in 20 minutes

Anyway, now I'm trying to find the patience to do a full format recover, but I have a question... Because the drive was repartitioned/formatted, I can choose from both logical and physical... What is the best option for me? (the harddisk is still empty)

Also i've tried doing a search allready, doesn't really seem to make a difference wether I search as logical of physical drive, however, in the default file selection somewhat around 13 file types had been selected... I clicked away a few and added 2 of my own setting the total selection to 5 files(common types, for my partition)... Anyway, during the search (I haven't searched for longer than about 30 minutes yet because I was too curious if there would be any results, and if changing any of the options would change the quality of the results) only 1 file pops up, and about 100.000 O/S items... Is this good or bad? What ARE O/S items anyway? Operating System files?
If so, I never had an operating system installed on the disk, it was merely a backup for a lot of my files (audio (i'm a music producer), video, mp3, text, etc etc)

Okay, sorry for the long post: In short I have 3 questions:

1. What is the best option for searching? Logical or Physical if both are available options, and the disk is entirely empty, just formatted?
   
2. How many filetypes should I min, and max select, and is it usefull to select common files on my drive? (for example, the drive contains LOADS of .WAV files)?
   
3. What are O/S items?

I tried getting this info from the Readme, but (to me anyway) it wasn't entirely clear on these subjects. If you find the time you might want to review it(/have it reviewed) sometime, as not all of the info is as clarifying as could be
As for the software itself; **** big up

Thanks!

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EDIT
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*Update:
After about an hour of searching I've found 3924 Files, and 126884 O/S items and counting!

*update:
runtime - 03:36:11
Files found - 12359
O/S Items found - 126908
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[GDH]

Hi,

Question 1 - Should I search Physical or Drive Letter?

A Physical Drive is the actual physical hard drive that you have located in your computer. As you know, a Physical Drive can be partitioned in to one or more Logical Drives which are represented by drive letters.

The primary reason for giving the option to search the Physical Drive is that if you have lost your drive letter and Windows no longer sees the partition/s then in order to search the drive the only option is to get physical drive access. In this case Recover My Files just looks at the physical drive as one big chunk of raw data and searches from the very beginning of the drive to the very end.

In your situation, you quick formatted the drive (For others reading this post - if you have lost your partition, don't format the drive as it actually makes recovery more difficult). Now, Recover My Files is able to see the drive letter as well as the Physical Drive. I presume you just made 1 big partition that covers the entire size of the drive?

The things to consider in selecting whether to search physical or logical are:

• If you made the new partition smaller than the original, then by searching the drive letter you would will miss some of the old drive data (it would be better to search the physical in this case);
  
• If you had reinstalled Windows or other software to the drive to the drive, then there would be no point including this data in the search because i) the files are not missing, and ii) it would make the search go longer. In this case it would be better to search the logical drive as Recover My Files will only look a the deleted areas of the new partition.

In your case - you can search physical or logical, because you have created a new drive letter which is the entire length of the physical drive and you have not installed any new files onto the drive.

Question 2 - How many file types should I select in a Complete Format Recover?

When you are recovering from a Formatted Drive and are running a Complete Format Recover, in 95% of cases you should search ONLY for the default selected file types - .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .xls, .doc, .avi, .wav, .ppt, .zip.

ONLY add more file types if you know that you do not have any of the above file types on the drive. Adding extra file types is not required and can slow down the search.

Only every include music or video file types if these were the ONLY file types on your disk.

You will be happy to know that in Version 4 of the program which will be released soon we have taken all these user selection decisions out of the program :-)..

Question 3 - What are OS Items?

At the start of you disk is a table called the Master File Table or MFT. This table contains a list of all files and folders on your computer. Each file has an "MFT record". Amongst other things, the MFT record for a file holds the name of that file and points to the storage location of the file on the hard disk.

OS items (Operating System items) are MFT records. The more OS items found the better, as each one represents that you will recover a file with the full file name and folder structure intact.

The way that RMF works is that it searches for the default selected file types by searching over the disk for their unique file structure - eg. the header and footer of that file type. When it finds a file, it does not know the name because the name is stored in the MFT record, which is why in File Type View whilst the search is in progress you see files with names like "Recovered_JPEG_1". However the program can use the files to identify the location of all MFT records (OS items), find them, and rebuild the entire file and folder structure (not just the selected file types. The complete file and folder structure is not rebuilt until the end of the search.

From the search results you have indicated so far Recover My Files will recover all you files with full file and folder names intact. All you need to do now is be patient. :-)

I hope this helps.

[Quince]

Hey!

Thanks for the reply.. Yes, it helps a lot!
But i'm affraid I need just a little more help

After about 10 hours of heavy duty searching, it seems to have found a LOT of data (maybe even everything)! Yay!
But a LOT of it is in the wrong place. I have a lot of folders with a little red X in front of it...

Is it possible to increase the rebuild results? Possible even being able to recover every file/folder with it's proper location? For example by resetting the file types search to the defaults? (I changed it to 5)

Thanks a bunch allready!

[GDH]

A red x on the folder means that the folder name has been lost and can no longer be recovered (there is nothing you can do about it). However, you should find that inside these folders any files and subfolders have the correct name.