I scanned my quick-formatted external hard disc now for about three days (2tb) and found a lot of files and even the structure. The status of he files is excellent.
However, when I try to recover them to another hard disc, it says after it's fnished: "0 files in XXX sec recovered". Below I can thee the files that are not recovered with the reason "The device is not ready". (Error messages may vary since they are translated by myself).
The hard disc is running and I have access through windows explorer to the hard disc.
Just to add to Alan's comments, is the drive you're trying to restore the folders to a new drive, and do any of the other error messages you get mention anything about the drive not being initialized?
Does it show up in Disk Management OK with a drive letter?
It is not a green device but windows is putting the discs to sleep whilste they are not in use. I've read about this scenario, but I thought it has been solved with an update. I read a post about one havong the same phenomenom which was postet on 15th of september also in this forum.
I got windows 7 in the 64bit version and I'm using USB2.0 to connect the hard disc. I tried to copy the data to another hard disc and also tested to copy it through another computer by using the network interface, Curiously about 10,000 random files were copied, all of them having a size of 1kb. about 220,000 haven't been copied though.
I didn't get any other error message but this one. The drive works very well, I can get acces through windows explorer and it is marked Ok in the disk management as well. I also tried to turn off the drive and turn it on again and also plugged it out/in in another USB slot.