bbchallenged

got impatient and cancelled the scan - oops, silly me. It has found loads of files and it was the files we were after, so it looks like they may have been deleted ? How ? Why ? It found the files under F:\?\disk1 that is very weird, as they should have been under F:\[our names] what does it mean ? There are log files, boot files and system volume files in there as well.

ok, to be honest, I am off to bed as well, so might as well let it run and see what it finds by the morning. If that doesn't find anything will try the other scans and the other thingie - I can't afford to pay anyone to recover, but a friend of mine works in IT for a bank - if all else fails, I see if he can get it recovered at work

cheers for that - I will keep it in mind if the deep scan will not find anything. I am not too worried yet, as the HD was not very full. I'll worry if it gets to 80% and not find any files... then I will try other options. Just don't want to stop it yet, and then have to start it all over again - it's taking ages. really appreciate your help though and I would love to know what happened. I just don't understand it. It was fine one minute, the next, it's lost everything...

yes, running a deep scan. We never deleted many files on that drive, it was always for back-up - will the deep scan find those files as well ?

37% done now - 12 hours to go..... still no files showing though. I hope I am getting these back. At least the important ones. I am not too fussed about the videos and the music files.

My boyfriend borrowed my portable harddrive to back-up some files from his laptop, both Linux and Windows files. He finished, unplugged the drive and plugged it back into my PC and it now shows as completley empty. He checked it under Linux and Windows, and both recognize the drive, but say that it has 500GB available and show nothing on there. It's a 500GB drive...(Linux showed a HD Folder and a recycling bin. The recycling bin had a System Volume File in it, nothing else, the other folder was empty) We are currently running recuva, hoping for the best, as I have just lost photos, important documents and business email back-ups, but it is taking ages ! It has done 25% so far, doesn't yet show any files found and says it has another 18hrs to go. Is it worth letting it finish or have these files gone into file-heaven ? The drive was about 20% used, possibly slightly more after his back-up of the Laptop. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate and the HD was formatted in NTFS. It is a Maxtor External USB Drive