Bigbaby

To be clear, the harddrive im trying to recover from had an issue, blue screen of death, and would not work. We tried a Dell Datasafe Recover, which we were assured would work, but did not -- windows reinstalled with none of our files existing. So, I am trying to recover any files from the empty space on that harddrive and restore them to my harddrive. There's no USB stick involved. So is the theory at this point that Recuva had all of the files that I wanted, but that I was unable to recover them because of a faulty calculation of the space-needed requirement?

I ran the normal scan earlier today (with Search for Non-Deleted Files checked). It took about 15 mins, and found a bunch of files that, in tree view, were under my G:\ drive. With my entire G:\ drive checked, I attempted to recover these files that were found to my C:\ drive. Recuva informed me that I was unable to do this via the "xxxxx bytes available, yyyyyy bytes needed for recovery". "xxxxx" in this case was ~500GB on my C:\ drive, and "yyyyy" was 650GB. The problem is, 650GB is larger than the entire G:/ drive. When I unchecked G:/ and selected a single file of size 5MB or so, it recovered successfully without that error message (although it took 3-4 minutes to do so). This was UNLIKE my previous experience with the Deep Scan results, when with G:/ entirely checked, I was told that I needed 3.6TB of space, and with G:/ entirely unchecked (except for one file), that I needed 3.5TB of space. I do have some questions that might reveal something: 1) You mentioned that I could cancel the quick scan after step 1/3 to save time... while this is true, on my end, step 1 takes 99+% of the time of all three steps. Step 2 and 3 are finished in under 30 seconds, at least with the non-deep scan. 2) You mentioned that the deep scan should take no longer than an hour or so... this actually took about 24 hours the first time around. 3) I have no idea where I can see the size of all of the files I've selected; I was only able to tell this after Recuva did not allow me to recover things, or can only tell it by clicking on individual files within Recuva. 4) I am running things in advanced mode. 5) I am unclear on what a "test recovery" is, as far as it differs from a "recovery attempt". In all cases, I got my size-of-files figures from attempting a recovery after a scan had been completed, if that helps.

Ok, Recuva (using quick scan + looking for non-deleted files) didnt find anything useful (none of the files I want). BUT, when I tried to recover what it did find, it told me that the total size was 650 GB (still larger than the physical disc and not something that should have been find-able in 20 mins of a quick scan, right?). More strangely, this time when I select only one file to recover, Recuva *does* allow me to do so. What in the world is going on?

Augeas, you are correct in your interpretation of what I was saying. As for drives, I wanted to ask a bit more info to be sure of what you meant. The external drive has windows 7 installed on it from a Dell computer. My computer is windows 7 installed on an HP; I usually see my C:\ drive, a recovery D:\ drive, and an inaccessible Q:\ drive. I had repeated problems this week with the external drive. Sometimes nothing would show up in My Computer when I connected the USB cable. If something did show up, both F:/ and G:/ would show. However, G:/ would sometimes not display any info, and would freeze windows explorer if I so much as clicked on it. Other times, G:/ would correctly tell me "XXGB free out of XX GB", would be openable, etc. F:/ has never been readable; windows either freezes or tells me that the drive is corrupted and unreadable. The drive is listed as having 640GB in total (from manufacturer); drive G has 556 of 581GB free. Elsewhere, I can see that F:/ has 14.65GB allocated (none used), and that there are two physical drives that are about 15GB larger than my C:\ and G:\ drive respectively. So other than the odd F:/ allocation (is this the equivalent of my D:/, recovery, drive??), there doesn't appear to be anything too crazy going on. In any case, to add more info, from googling, I read that many windows programs can cause problems with USB connections. As someone who doesnt regularly use my USB ports, I thought that this was maybe the cause of the G:/ drive sometimes freezing. I am currently in Safe Mode, going off of this theory, and have been able to correctly view my G:/ drive over the past 24 hours straight. I don't see my Q:/ drive in safe mode -- not sure if that matters. Let me know if there is an exact way to check my disc allocation! I am running recuva non-deep scan for non-deleted files at this time, will report back later today. EDIT: Using Computer Management, I see that the external drive has XXX allocated to drive G:/ which is Healthy, NFTS, Primary Partition. Drive F:/ is Healthy, RAW, Active, Primary partition. there is a 100MB OEM partition as well (healthy).

The drive I was attempting to recover from is of size 580GB... recuva found data totalling 5-6 times more than the entire drive could possibly hold. The problem was twofold: 1) Of identified files, most of them showed up 5-10 times. This was the smaller of the two issues. 2) Even after unselecting every single file (except for one) out of the >1M files found, the size of my recovery attempt only went from 3.6T to 3.5T; the 1M files were totalled about 100GB in size. I have no idea what Recuva thought that 3.5T (again, several times the size of the hard drive I am attempting recovery on) was, but it certainly didn't actually exist on the external drive in any way shape or form.

The problem was that it refused to let me recover even a single selected file, because Recuva claimed that I had 3.5T selected which did not fit on my other hard drive. It was very frustrating to see that after a day of waiting for the scan to complete.

Ok my scan finished running, and I've encountered another issue. I ran a Deep Scan with "Find undeleted files" checked as well. Unfortunately, the results contain ~10 copies of every file that was recovered! The total size of the files I am trying to recover is 3.6T, even though the drive's entire size is 600GB. Has this happened to anybody else, and what can I do to address this? EDIT: I tried unchecking every file that Recuva had found except for a few excel files, and was told that I still needed 3.5T to recover (less than before, but still absurd). What is going on here?

Update: late last night, I noticed that connecting the external hard drive was causing two partitions to appear in My Computer (F and G). Unlike earlier in the week when I had started attempting file recovery, neither drive was accessible; windows explorer would freeze if I attempted to open (or even right click) the F or G drive. No info (e.g. free space, total space) was displayed for either drive. After restarting my computer twice and after some bizzare behavior, the G drive now shows GB of free space as it should, like the C drive. Recuva has been working properly overnight (50% done, 1.9m files found), so I am guessing that my problems had to do with my computer's messed up interpretation of what the external drive was, rather than any issue with Recuva.

We had a computer crash, and we attempted a Dell Datasafe Recover of our personal data after having somebody (at best buy, unfortunately!) show us that option. Unfortunately, that technician began and cancellled (via powering the computer off) that process, since he was just showing us how to do it... when we did the same thing later, Dell Datasafe did not ask us to log into a profile (as it had before). So, the process reinstalls windows, and we had none of our files recovered as we were supposed to, which I blame on the process being cancelled after it had begun by the Best Buy guy. In any case, we can say this is like a reinstall of windows. After observing that the files that were supposed to be there were not there, we discontinued use of the computer. I tried a different software first (Wondershare), which found many pictures in good condition, but which had two problems: 1) Almost no Word or Excel documents were recovered in good condition 2) only 100MB is recoverable without paying for it. I thought I'd use Recova to see if it had better luck with our excel files, since ive heard that some software has better results than others with particular files. As of this posting, I have had a scan running for 4 hours and it still says 0% Progress, and this time actually still says "Calculating time left"... the number of files found (70k-ish) is exactly the same amount that it had found in the first hour of scanning. Our goal is to recover every JPEG file on the computer and one excel file in particular. Other excel and word docs are a bonus. The drive is a 2.5" SATA, and I am not sure what USB cable I am using; I got an enclosure+USB off of Ebay to connect the harddrive externally to the computer I'm using to type this -- let me know how I can tell which USB cable I have! EDIT: from googling, I can see that I don't have USB 3.0... not sure on 2.0 vs. 1.0. Other info: task manager says that recova is using a fixed amt of memory and no CPU as of this time.

I am running recova (deep scan) on an external harddrive of ~600GB. After running for an hour or so, it finds tens of thousands of files, but still says that the scan is 0% complete and that it won't be finished until 8 days from now. Then, half an hour later, the # of files found was the same, but the estimated completion time was 12 days. I am thinking that the program is freezing, although I dont know why. A few weeks ago, I tested the software on my regular (C:/) drive and had no such issues. Should I wait 10+ hours for recova in this situation, hoping that it will eventually finish, or is the "Current Progress: 0%" a sign of something going wrong?