Deep scan seems stuck

Recuva
1

Hello everyone.

recently a friend requested my help in recovering some files from an external hard drive. The disk is a 1TB Samsung external drive, formatted for windows and it contained some video and image files. By his account the drive had less than 150 GB of date in use. He plugged it in in a smart TV that he wasn't familiar with. The smartTV did not recognize the format of the drive and requested to reformat it, he accepted that request. As you can imagine that caused him to lose all the data. When I got the drive, Windows could not access it and it showed up as a drive only in Disk Management. I reformatted the drive in order to be able to work on it. I made sure that the drive has not been used since to avoid any overwrites.

Quick scan does not show any files. When I started a deep scan, the estimated time is first around 12 hours. I left it running all night and came back after 8 hours only to see the estimate has risen to 1 day. The percentage of completion is hovering around 20% from the 15% I left it around 3 hours after the scan started. I canceled the scan and I have 25 files recovered, a few pictures and a huge 900GB file named BadSector. The image files are recoverable. I restarted the deep scan and now I am 6 hours in, the estimated finish is 1 day and the percentage complete is 17%. My power options on my machine is to never sleep, only for the screen to shut down after 5 minutes of inactivity.

Should I let it run for as long as it requests?

Thanks in advance for any help.

My setup is AMD Athlon II X4 640, 4 GB ram, Windows 10 64-bit. Drive is a 1TB Samsung external hard disk.

2

At a guess, the drive was formatted as NTFS. The TV probably doesn't recognise NTFS as it is a proprietary file system that you have to pay to use. The TV may well have formatted the disk as ext3. The Windows format probably went back to NTFS. I don't know whether either of these formatting exercises would have zeroed all clusters. What is certain is that a normal scan won't find any but system files.

A deep scan will look at all clusters on the disk. That's how it finds data (or not, as the case may be). I should try to let it finish, especially as you say you have found some pics. Are they lost user pics, or some other pics?

When the deep scan has ended you could try a normal scan with Show non-deleted files checked, but I wouldn't put any money on success. It will run quickly though.