travelgirl

i'm having the same problem with excellent jpgs: recuva can't handle them. the files were photographed last night, with no chances for overwrite by any program. and yet, those files recuva says are "unrecoverable" or "poor" were 99% recovered perfectly. go figure... [ a few minutes later ] tried another recovery program (testdisk and photorec) and was able to recover ALL of the files from the partition, including those recuva had marked as "excellent" but was unable to recover... the program uses an extremely primitive dos interface, and it's not for the faint of heart, but it worked first time.

i just had a similar problem: poor and unrecoverable files were recovered perfectly, while excellent files with no overwrites couldn't be seen. is this reverse world?

yes, and in most cases, that will usually fix the problem. SO, MY QUESTION: is there a reason why a normal defrag doesn't also do a freespace defrag at the same time? it seems exceedingly silly to me that i have to actually run several defrags on a 750gig HD in order to gain any semblance of order. and, given the dichotomy of file sizes i have to work with, it's a never-ending job because the defrag program itself makes the issue worse by doing using the end of the drive for storage even though it's been told not to.

on a similar note, it would be nice to be able to view what a scheduled defrag is doing. "watching" the dosbox that was created gives me no idea what the disk looks like, nor what files are being moved, or where... thanks...

i'm actually interested in this, too. for some reason, DF will frequently put files at the end of the disk, even though there is an incredible amount of free real estate (10s, if not 100s of gigabytes) before those files. i think my problem might be a substantial mix of large files (in excess of 300meg (thousands of these)) and small files (no larger than 10 meg (10s of thousands of these))...