I've been using CCleaner for years and love it (in fact my name is CCLEANER Greg on Xbox live as well) so I decided to try Recuva to recover the data lost from my 2TB drive. I realized that I had to give the drive a name and format it (I used quick formatting so it wouldn't actually erase any data) then I let it run for around 24 hours and it only showed a few files. I then tried to recover those files and the program confirmed my fear. At some point in time the device became disconnected and Recuva just kept 'reading' the disk even though it couldn't actually detect anything. When I say it confirmed my fear it's because I had checked in Disk Management while Recuva was still running and the disk didn't show up. I also checked after Recuva stopped and it didn't show up until I removed and replugged in the drive. Because I assumed the program would detect a problem I also assumed the disk not showing up was normal but, evidently it wasn't. This is a problem you need desperately to fix and when you do please make sure it's possible to just replug the device in. Also, if you could add the ability to scan seemingly unformatted drives. When my external broke the drive said it was unformatted (raw) (the part that broke was the USB connector which I've temporaraly replaced with another USB connector). Since Recuva's supposed to be able to recover files from damaged partitions it would make sense for it to scan such a disk (In the scan list something like Disk#).
Thanks and sorry if I seem mean or cruel or whatever but realizing that I wasted that much time really pissed me off.
I feel your software may have found a hacking activity. About 18 months ago I ran a search of my hard drive and found a file called 'Thunderbird_emails.zip' with not author, creation or modification date. I could not delete it either. When I recovered it to another drive it was 993Mb of all my mail in .eml format - a format I don't use.
What would be really cool would be the ability for your software to securely delete files found. This saves having to copy vast quantities of data to a drive in the hope that it over writes the data to be destroyed. In the case above this won't work - it was a hack, my C drive kept going ballistic, if I physically disconnected the internet it stopped.
Overall I am really impressed with Recuva which has joined my toolkit on my memory stick and stopped so much misery. Just last week I got 40Gb of family pictures back of an 'unrecoverable' drive. Result! The family where shocked and delighted.
One other thing: I notice not one recovery tool lets you just undelete like you used to. Is this a problem with NTFS?
Thats a Micro$oft thing; Even Windows98 could withstand you unplugging the C drive but try taking a CD-ROM or floppy out - BSOD!
You need to get Recuva to check for non-deleted files (files lost due to format) etc. Then your stuff will pop up. Hell I just recovered an Ubuntu OpenOffice installation from a drive formatted NTFS! Your stuff is there.
I suggest taking the drive out of the external enclosure and putting it in your machine. I've never known external drives last more than six months, then they get 'cyclic redundancy error', no, its the pins on the power cable oxidising so there is not enough power to the hard drive armetures so they don't respond on time so they cannot find the data. Take the drive out, put it in your PC et voila it will work.