Piriform's website claims that Recuva "can recover files from damaged or newly formatted drives" and states that "Recuva scans all parts of a drive...".
Am I misunderstanding? Or am I victim of a documentation problem? Or both?
Scenario: Four volumes (C: through F:). Then a crash, and drive D: disappears! When looking at Windows’ Disk Management I now see healthy drives C:, E: and F: but the remainder of the drive now shows as “Unallocated”.
So I obtain and launch Recuva, in the hope of recovering files that were on the now-phantom drive D:. First problem: Before scanning, I have to select what to scan. But while C:, E: and F: are included as options, “Unallocated” is not. Perhaps I have to select “All local disks”? No, that appears to scan only C:, E: and F:.
Then I browse through online help and discover that to recover non-deleted files (damaged, etc. drives) I have to select option “Scan for non-deleted files”.
OK, that makes sense but a subsequent scan of “All local disks” with “Scan for non-deleted files” selected returns thousands of existing files from, you guessed it, C:, E: and F: only!
So I’m left to guess that either (1) the crash damage was so great that all traces of files on D: have disappeared or (2) Recuva can only scan areas that are currently allocated a drive letter (and not “all parts of a drive”, though that’s perhaps a confusing or ambiguous Piriform statement).
The answer to this may be that I have to FIRST re-assign “D” to the Unallocated space, which I haven’t yet tried while not wanting to do anything that may affect the space that needs to be scanned for files. But if that IS the answer, clearer program documentation would be a great help.
Comments/answers appreciated.