I see this topic is a little old but I also recently had the "out of memory" error and here is what i was working with and worked for me.
Working with a failed IOMEGA 1TB (this is an external USB drive with two 500GB sata drives in a JBOD array inside the case and the USB to SATA controller card had failed) Doesn't it suck when your nearly new just barely out of warranty back up drive fails but yet a 10+ year old WD drive is still kicking?
Anyway I ditched the case and put both HDD in my tower and hooked them directly to my mobo running 1.5GB ram
Using the basic mode of recuva it was unable to read the MFT. Then trying the advanced (deep recovery would take nearly a day and then I would get the dreaded "Out Of Memory Error" both options with no files found.
So my A+ training kicked in and I thought, I might have to reformat the drive as windows could see 2 partitions per drive but could not do anything with it b/c now being 2 seperate drives it saw it as unformatted...and of course windows XP Pro 32bit failed on a quick and a regular format, I thought I was going to lose my files for good, I am not about to pay the high dollar for data recovery - but dont worry the story gets better.
So using Norton Partition Magic 8.0 I was able to delete the partitions that windows did see and then create a new 500GB partition formatted as NTFS...success windows can now see and use it....and just to give myself the best chances of recovery w/o error I changed my min/max page file to maximum reccommended.(I dont reccomend keeping it there - change it back to original when you are finished.)...Now running recuva again, it still found nothing in the basic mode, but alas after a few hours in the advanced mode it found most of the files I was looking for. I did find some of the recovered files were now spilt into multiple files which made them mostly unuseable - I think this is b/c a large file can be stored across several sectors of the HDD. I guess some of them are just going to have to be acceptable losses.
Now probably the bestest part EVER! - Hours and hours of sorting thru what I want and dont want as some files did not retain their original file name they were just assigned a number and recreating the folder structure and organization I once had. But I guess I shouldnt complain, it seems like everyone has to learn the lessons of backing everything up - even the back ups! At least the program worked. Good Luck!
