recently when i connected my external hard drive to my laptop (both my XP and Vista laptops) the drive letter would show but it appeared as unformatted.
the last time i had connected it, it was NTFS formatted and contained no less than 75GB of varying personal data.
i found recuva some weeks ago and decided to give it a try.
i attempted to run a scan but couldn't because the drive had no drive letter and couldn't be assigned one because it appeared to be unformatted.
in my exasperation i decided to quick format it using the NTFS.
i reattempted to run a scan and it appeared to be proceeding.
the scan got through somewhere between 12% and 18% of pass one.
it found just fewer than 100,000 files when the scan progress bar simply disappeared.
there are two things to note after the progress bar disappears:
1. the footer portion of the Recuva screen says "The semaphore timeout period has expired."
2. the hard drive's drive letter disappears and if removed and reconnected, it says it's "uninitialized". the drive must be rebooted to resolve.
attached is a screenshot of recuva after the error.
i didn't find a great deal of info on the web about this sort of error.
what i did find seemed to relate to large files being copied/moved.
what i can say is that there were/are a fair amount of *.7z files on the drive which are more than 10GB in size.
