Ian S

I have no issues with scanning for lost files, I am struggling to recover the lost files. To answer your questions: I didn't format anything (yet), and why would I reinstall Windows? As for the hard drive dying: One day I noticed that the hard drive was still running despite the PC being turned off (external power supply), so I unplugged it (shouldn't have done that). Afterwards it was not accessible anymore and probably reformatted to RAW due to this incident. What has happened since then is that I actually got a recovery process going. It was painfully slow and took over 12 full days for a single folder of images and a few short videos... but it reported zero files as recovered the whole time, never gave me a final report and all that was recovered was the original folder structure and a few "empty" jpeg files. Can images actually be recovered if they are part of the "non-deleted" section?

HI all, Last week my external HDD hard drive died. First off, I have huge issues to get it connected and recognised by windows7 at all, but eventually I found that it was only recognised as RAW. After a bit of internet search I found Recuva and also learned to handle the initial issues. - By now I always skip the second and third step of the deep scan, as it would get stuck on it. With that I get my files that used to be on the hard drive, beautifully listed. - I also have disabled USB hub time out/send to sleep, to avoid the hard drive spinning down due to "not being used". - If I would uncheck "Scan for Non-Deleted Files", I only end up with a small amount of unfamiliar files, all my personal images and files must have been lost in the reformatting incident? Regardless of all this, when I try to recover a file, even a single jpeg image, it won't even start the recovery process and will be stuck at 0%. Any ideas what I can do? What is the normal recovery time frame for a few images? Any help is very welcome.