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JayDubyah

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Posts posted by JayDubyah

  1. 1) That's right the cost implication was for Easeus - my bad. Update - no I wasn't wrong on this - it costs $18 to get the deep scan feature in the wizard of Recuva. Easeus charges $70 after claiming to offer 1 - 2 T of recovery for free, but then allow only 500 M when you use it.

    2) Yes it might show more drives because it shows unlettered ones (ok, both modes might show them, but the wizard won't do squat with them) No, you don't have to go into advance mode, but it is more clear what it is doing.

    3) I assumed that he might run into what I was running into - the drive did not have a letter and it showed partitions. It was not clear what drive was which. So by eliminating the ones that I knew were c: drive partitions (disk 0 some places or hard drive 0 or hard drive 1, etc), I aimed it at the lowest numbered hard drive beyond the C: drive's partitions. I don't recall exactly what I saw, but I know it was not the same as other programs like Disk Partition and Easeus used. The point is that he might see more than one partition on the hard drive and he could logically start at the first one because if it is a UEFI drive, it will have a small partition at the front end - he might have a  chance if it can be recovered. In fact my single partition has a hidden partition that holds the info for starting things up, so he could start by trying to recover that partition - I don't know.

    4) No one said that Recuva allocated a drive letter. You know that the drive was not being recognized because it did not have a drive letter, yet after running under Recuva, the system found it and gave it a drive letter. My suspicion now is that Recuva does not support EFI. Or at least it thought that this drive was not EFI when it was. The drive that I am referring to is my failing drive. If you read in the suggested upgrades, the man writes that he suggests that you indicate something about things might get changed - it is clear to me that something changed mine, but it might have been my fault - if it was I don't know what I should have done differently. The fact remains that the first partition on this drive was somehow clobbered - at the same time as the c: drive I would guess. Both use EFI and both were acting like they were rewritten. However, different programs could read the drives' partitions and sizes etc. so all was not lost - not yet anyway. 

    I did try to make a disk image, but it wouldn't do it - I think it said no file system, not sure. So I went ahead and attempted to recover the drive because I expected with deep scan to get sector by sector. It worked for 36 hours on the drive, went slowly through all 3 phases and then I was going to insert another drive to write on. I normally have a c: drive, d: drive (cd), e: drive (sd card), f: drive was the bad drive hooked to usb and an X drive for backup other stuff that I do. Before I could do that I realized that the drive was now F: and the software claimed there were 9 drives. Now you will count that out and see that there are nowhere near 9 drives, but when I was ready to hook up the g: drive to use for the recovery of the many files that it claimed to have found, it said there were 9. So how did it  get to 9? Obviously it is counting the drives in a strange way (well, not so strange) there are hidden partitions that it was calling drives - it said the c: drive or hard disk 1 or disk 1 had 5 drives on it. It has an MBR setup with a small boot partition, the main c: partition, some special Dell partition and a recovery partition at least 4, so there is one extra. The e drive has 1, the dead drive (now F:) had at least 1, should have been 2 or 3 and the x: drive has 3 I believe. I have no idea how it came up with 9, but that is what it said. Perhaps it did not count the unnamed partitions, but however you count them 9 isn't right. c, e, f, x should be only 4. I am quite certain that the d: drive was not included. That 9 count has a different terminology on it - so 9 drives is probably not accurate representation of what it meant. I took it to mean that it could scan any one of those 9 entities and I referred to them as drives - a very loosely used term anyway.

    Be that as it may, when I noticed that things were not going to work as I had hoped (the drive was now  seen as F: and the entire system had been tested rather than just the F: (I had removed the e:, and the x: drives before I started the scan, but put them back on to do some other work after it had finished and was sitting there saying it was done) and then noticed that the list of files included c: drive files and there were 9 drives), so I disconnected the other drives that I could - the x, the e:, leaving only the c: and the now f: and plugged in a 3 T usb 3 drive to attempt to transfer the files to it. The program allowed me to select the drive g: and when I told it to transfer all the files onto it, it sat there for several hours looking at me - so I told it to cancel. It just sat there - so I disconnected the new drive (unplugged the usb) that I had canceled the operation on (it had the no data on it that wasn't already there). The F: drive was direct connect on an esata port. The G: drive was on a usb 3 hub which uses the output of the pcmcia ( forget the new name for that) card to run usb 3.0 and takes power from another usb port to power the whole thing.

    I have a Dell Studio 1797 with 1T ssd hybrid drive for c: The system has about 6 Gig of memory and is I5 dual core 2.4 speed - it's pretty fast anyway. So when all of that happened I was a little surprised when the Recuva program closed itself down. No warning, no message - just gone. I have been around these pcs since 1980 (yes, I was a developer) and I have seen a lot of strange things so I recognized what happened was the software being dumped for bad actions. I understand that it provides an ini file capability, but that is probably special set up. 

  2. What is a possible drive for not the same drive?  Well any external drive large enough to contain the files such as a USB external drive is what I tried to use. So what happened, it allowed me to select all of the files, identify the drive and the location on the drive and then hung up. I finally told it to cancel so the program dumped and 36 hours of recovery down the tubes. I noticed that it has several other problems as well. It had scanned all of the files on all of the drives on the system, not the ones on the drive that I wanted. That one comes up with unknown file system now after it failed to recover. I think these programs modify the drive and destroy the info. If your data is important, better get a pro to fix it - don't mess with these apps.

  3. It would seem like the most likely method to create a reformat would be to take the MFT and move it along with supporting info to an unused location on the disk with a director to it, then create a new table with only the necessary basic stuff and the drive would be formatted. Instead they do something quite different and throw away all of the existing information without wiping the disk. If they used that little improvement, they could easily undo an unintentional reformat (uninformed intentional reformat) and put you back in business immediately as long as you did nothing with the drive after it was reformatted. Too simple I guess.

     

  4. Yes, this would be really nice to know before hand. If the program will destroy chances of recovery, i would not do it. Perhaps trying another recovery program has already ruined it. Some of the programs indicate that the user should make an image of the drive - of course, that is quite impossible because the system does not recognize the drive at all, let alone image it.

    I have made the apparently erroneous assumption that the program only reads the data and takes information into memory until it is convinced that the data is there, then rewrites the indices etc. It would make more sense to leave the drive unmodified. Show the user what data it has and ask the user to identify whether or not the data is correct. In other words, if a file is located and it is unknown if it is the right one, ask the user, allow the user to recover it and try it to determine whether it has actually been recovered.

    Assume that undeleted files are the files that are desired unless expressly told differently. That is, perhaps interrogation of the user before starting and a little info about what the decision that has to be made will entail for each possible choice is appropriate.

  5. The problem is that they cannot tell how long it will take, they guess based on the previous file sequence. From what I see, the program does not allow itself to get into endless loops. But if the rabbit trail of data writes is too long or is corrupted so it loops back into itself, they could go for hours, but like I say Recuva appears to have attempted to avoid that problem. But that is all that can be said.

    I have found only one other program that I tried and it appeared to work (Easeus Data Recovery Pro) - it took almost 40 hours on a 3 T drive which was half full at least. (It really doesn't matter because they have to check every sector on that huge drive for content, catalog it somehow and then determine what sector belongs to what file and to which entry in the log. They have to determine whether or not the data they are seeing is from previously erased file or something else - it is fairly complicated. If your data is worth $70 to you go for it. 

    I have only had one drive go bad in the last 20 years. My daughter has lost two in the last six months: a 1 T WD 2.5" and a 3 T Toshiba 3.5". At first I could at least see the drives, but as I have worked on them, they have deteriorated rather than improve

    My question would be, why does the program not stop and ask if they can recover what they have so far periodically, so that you can be looking at how good a job they are doing and determine whether or not to continue. The answer is that they probably do not know until all of phase 1 is complete which is the major portion of their recovery. Also if the drive itself is failing because of a hardware problem, you are not going to recover anything until it begins working again. That means removing the cover (destroying the drive) and replacing parts with functional parts before recovery - then hoping that the heads were not destroyed or get destroyed by the contamination of your non-clean-room environment. If you are in that position, there are services who can recover your data for a reasonable price, but not cheap.

     

  6. They say upfront that FAT32 is very difficult to recover. Good luck. Most likely none of them will work, but if you can find out about the file format, you might try a converter to put it into a different format of the same kind such as, for example, mp4 into mpeg or something like that. They might have run into the issue and have a fix builtin to handle it.

  7. On 12/27/2017 at 09:14, sjlouis said:

    Sorry, I did not answer earlier because I haven't received a mail response. I've changed the settings ^_^ .

    I've seen we can reconstruct the full path of the files but it works only if the file is in an existing directory. EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard can restore deleted directories but it's very expensive (95 $) while I used this function 2 or 3 times in 10 years.

    I don't know if it's very difficult to restore a directory, it's "only" a file with different properties.

    Have you actually successfully recovered directories in EaseUS Data Recovery or they show up as they appear on the screen as though recovered? I mean have you actually had them recovered so that you can use them? I am reluctant to spend $70 to buy software that looks like it works on the free trial, but only allows 500 MB to be read so a fee of $69.95 is offered to recover everything - I didn't do the recovery and now it appears that the drive is altered. It can no longer be recognized by other standard programs that could see it before. I missed the limitation and ran for about 48 hours recovering it said about 1600 files with 21 Gib of data. But I was only allowed 500 Meg so I got none. I am now running Recuva and it has been working for 21 hours, still no output. 

  8. If the 'drive' is not recognized as a drive, Recuva will not see it. You have to use the 'advanced ,,,' mode available to the right end of the bar near the top. I think that will cost you about $18. It will then show you the drives and ask essentially the same questions as the wizard shows as posted by JackAnt. If you have no idea about the workings at that point, you might need some help. I would pick the partition at the beginning of the drive and tell the program to recover everything (ALL). I forget the exact terminology, but it is similar to Recuva Wizard shown by JackAnt in a previous post. 

    Update: The information I gave was erroneous about finding deep scan on the tool bar. I selected options and in advanced tab selected deep scan only. Then I selected the drive from the disks that were listed by clicking on the wedge next to the c:. A list came up that listed hard drives and one of them I was able to determine from its size or something like that determined from the list - it showed a drive without a letter hard drive 3 I think it was - now that drive is showing up as F: so they changed something. I did try to make an image of the drive I believe, but it didn't change anything that I noticed before I went ahead with the hard drive 3. Now the drive is drive F: 

    So I don't know how to get into a dead disk anymore. I was successful by using deep scan and selecting the drive based on the hard drive name. But somehow the software has now made the drive unreadable - it says that the drive has no file system when yesterday it was able to read the file system. The only difference between then and now is the operation on it using Recuva Pro. I paid $18 (not much) for the privilege of waiting 36 hours for it to tell me that it had scanned all of the disks on my system and was able to recover everything on the C drive but nothing on the F: drive which it could now no longer read.

    There is no warning that they actually rewrite the drive and it did indicate that it could not make an image of the drive which I tried first. I then selected the hard disk 3 which was the 3T drive with unallocated space and told it to deep scan which they indicated was a sector scan as I understood it. And as I said when it finished a day and a half later, it showed many files from the c: drive, I didn't see any from the F: drive. So I told it to recover the files (selected all) onto another 3 T external drive which was loaded as G: selected a location on the drive (path) and told it to add a new folder - it indicated the 'New Folder' and hung. After a few minutes, I said to cancel the operation. It waited for about 2 minutes and dumped the whole thing - stopped the program and lost all of the information. Upon bringing it back up, I see that I now had 9 drives on the system so I shut off most of them - including the G drive and a couple of others.

    All I can figure is that they have a piss-poor gui and very little attempt to fix the problems with the program. I think that I will try to get my money back on this piece of junk.

    I see by one of the comments under suggested improvements that someone said they should add such a warning about rewriting the drive. Good grief - couldn't make it work without rewriting things? It would seem it would be better to map the drive onto another virtual disk and create a virtual copy to work on by reading the sectors. Then they could try various methods on copies of the image to try to reconstruct the true image based on the info they found. Then by involving the user who might actually know something about the contents, ask him to verify things that he knew were right, from that they could get confidence as to their progress. As it is, it is a big waste of time. I also noticed that the drive I am using is a UEFI drive, I'll check, but I'll bet it now has an MBR file system and has been wiped as a result. Just a guess.

     

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