Alan_B

I consider an image backup far superior to a clone because :- A clone costs an entire "spare" HDD, whilst a backup is just a another file to keep in an archive; A Macrium image backup can always be validated courtesy of its built-in hash checksums, and this may apply to Acronis which I gave up on, But a clone gives no clues - it either fails to boot, or if it boots you need to run SFC to check the integrity of its Operating System, BUT after that your user documents and Applications are subject to Murphy's Laws; Two backups are not enough incase one gets corrupted, and the same applies to clones; i.e. you need to make and preserve 3 clones if you want to be sure of finding a good one in your hour of need.

No one can like anything - not even Moderators

The point is that what data has not yet been destroyed would be preserved until such time as either Recuva will be enhanced to recover those files that do not exceed the length limit, or you find alternative software which is better adapted to your situation. If you must "recover the checked data right now" then the best you can do is uncheck the items on the longest path, and try and repeat until you exclude all the excessive length items. Have you reread and studied all of Nergal's posts ?

I never said it was a good option I suggest that In practise it might not cause much loss in this situation, based upon these assumptions :- The external drive of 3 TB suggests there may be more than 1 TB of user data to recover from a system drive that may exceed 1 TB in capacity ; XP Home occupied less than 6 GB out of a 12 GB partition C:\ on my Laptop, and was on the fast end of the HDD, Defraggler shows me that after at least one year without defragging there is less than 1 GB that is in the last 6 GB of C:\ which suggests that had C:\ been 1 TB of then only 0.1% of the deleted (formatted) user data space would have been over-written by the normal re-writing of Windows files. I do however agree that the less it is used the better. It would be good to install Windows on a different HDD, and only connect the existing HDD as a secondary HDD (or external HDD) for reading/recovery. An equivalent effect via software instead of hardware, is to create a FORENSIC image backup of partition C:\, but this would involve a very steep learning curve to get it right. N.B. Yes, I did appreciate Schroedinger's cat.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have not seen this critter today. Perhaps it was a mayfly which only lives for one day. If it comes back again then I will check out the connectors. Its movement is definitely random, but is continuous - it does not skip or jump but just a meander. Once I see it then it stays visible as it meanders until it falls of the edge of the screen.

Thanks for that thought Hazel. If only my monitor held a vacuum and spat out 12 kVolt electrons its eggs were not be fertile. I wonder if I could get a patent on a pest repellent monitor like that. No, I do not see them out of the window.

How about clicking on the "Path" header to sort the results into path order. Then adjust the width of the Path column to see the entire name of the paths. There is a good chance that if you refrain from selecting anything with a long path name you may be lucky, and you can restore without hitting th path length error. Otherwise wait for Piriform to enhance Recuva so it skips the impossible and does what it can.

Have a look at post #8 in http://forum.pirifor...showtopic=38776 The maximum length for an entire file path plus name is something like 260 characters and is a Windows limit that applies to the creation of any Windows file, regardless of whether the file is created by Recuva or by anything else, including the copying of files from a camera or the internet.

That is libel - no one ever heard me say that Microsoft ever Excel in anything but BSOD's Microsoft Excel is worse than useless. I developed a spreadsheet with a few macros for validating a charity's tax refund claims before they were submitted. It worked well on my machine, and it seemed to work on the charity's machine, but since I do not trust M.S. I compared printouts and found major discrepancies.

That appears to address a stationary defect. What I see is more like a very small ant that crawls in random directions at perhaps 0.5 cm per second. An effective solution would be what I did as a child - wait till mum was busy and then boiling a kettle of water to pour down an ant's nest. That should be safe because there is no consumer protection label warning me not to do that

I have just seen a small spot the size of a full stop crawling across my Samsung monitor screen. It looked as if it is on the front surface, but it is not affected when I wipe the screen with my podgy paw. There it is again - zigzagging and meandering, and totally unaffected when I switch Tabs from one website to another. Is the interior of the monitor hospitable to carbon based insects ? Am I subject to an alien silicon based life form ?

Then simply check "CustomFiles and Folders" under "Windows / Advanced" and stipulate the event log files under Options / Include

Sorry - your world may be worse than you realise. According to Murphy's Law any Data Recovery procedure that has a chance of recovering one of your media files is almost certain to also recover any virus that went "underground" with the format. Long story short :- If your photos were infected before the format, they will be infected after recovery ; Anything you recover may be an instant source of cross infection. The forum policy is to refer you to malware sites listed at :- http://forum.pirifor...showtopic=34786 In your particular case they may be unable to help until you have recovered your files since they probably cannot detected deleted malware. I suggest you await a moderator's opinion before taking further action. In the mean time it might help if you confirm / correct / clarify the following points :- 1. You are currently using as C:\ with XP Pro the same HDD that was running XP Home as C:\ when malware struck, which your local store then formatted and install XP Pro. 2. Your current focus has been to recover your files which are deleted from C:\ 3. You also had an external drive which was destroyed by the local shop. Was that previously used to archive copies of the files you wish to recover ? Is this the purpose behind sending the disk to Seagate ? (NB The system drive may be the first target of malware, but it could also migrate to external drives.)

Actually in post #4 I said the opposite, to select the green. I first suggested In post #2 that ALL files be recovered to avoid the frustration of spend hours on reselecting everything desired into a list that again evaporates into thin air before it can be used.

Actually the UK authorities are not the only ones that take an interest in those who are obtaining information or materials for the building of Weapons of Mass Destruction. I though everything knew that. I only used Uranium as an illustration of one of the many things that might attract such attention. There may be other legitimate things on Craigslist that when clicked could result in extra attention with targeted spam. I never wanted to know what you were clicking, I just wanted you to recognise that perhaps some links might result in more persistent memories within history.

How much HTML would I get coded for one tin of Baked Beans

Is Craigslist a random variable ? A quick search gives About 7,889,750 result. e.g. craigslist.co.uk craigslist.org newyork.craigslist.org losangeles.craigslist.org Could there be different sorts of history depending upon which site and which subsection is visited? Could you attract special tracking cookies if you try to buy Uranium

Does something bad come from visiting Craigslist ? There are now 3 different bug report topics. See http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=38782&hl=craigslist http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=38812&hl=craigslist#entry236114

Please clarify :- If you click on that unwanted context menu item, does it initiate an on-demand installation ?

It saves you the frustration of individually selecting half a million green files and then finding the list has disappeared just before you saved. I think you can click on the column headers to sort the list so that all the Green Files are in one contiguous block, and then you can select all the Green files with just a few keyboard clicks.

Do you have the same problem if you un-install this un-named c# application ?

Why not select everything and save the whole lot ? Hopefully you already know that you must not save back to the drive that was formatted.

So the Processor Microcode is not "patched" upon the installation of the Windows Update, but instead it is patched by a manually started Service - an "on-demand" patch. When I first read that Microsoft were patching the processor microcode it brought back unhappy memories of being on training courses, based on reconfigurable processors such as Inmos Transputers and Xilinx bit-slice Digital Signal Processor Arrays. I was horrified by the thought that Microsoft could replace the AMD processor instruction for "Divide A by B" with their own enhancement to benefit Windows vs Linux, and that due to a Microsoft oversight a "Divide by Zero" error would cause a BSOD. It is a slight comfort that after such a BSOD the system can restart and run again - until the service is again started "on-demand"

I am happy that you got your data back. I will leave it for a moderator to advise upon whether log files etc. would be of value

N.B. You are fortunate the Disc was MBR, I lost all partitions on a GPT disk and Minitool Partition Recovery is not suitable for GPT discs.