No recover folder destinations available

Greetings, I am new to forum.

I registered in an attempt to recover files from a (physically) damaged HD, using Recuva.

The disk is not dead, Windows 7 startup repair tools took about 50h ! to diagnose the disk before giving the message :

SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disk 1 : Hitachi HTS545032B9A300-(S2)

WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent

Press F1 to Continue

Obviously I have no intention of keeping the disk : program files and many other files too are useless, but I do want to recover some data, mainly from the Documents folder of one user.

Toshiba Satellite laptop, running Windows 7

I made a new Windows 7, live boot disk. It boots of course and I used the command line with basic "DOS" DIR, XCOPY, CD etc, to view and test copy files and folders. I plugged in an external HD to a USB port. Copying files (with XCOPY) worked somewhat... it copied many files until it hit a bad file, where it stuck until an I/O error. So RECUVA time.

I installed the free RECUVA version on another computer and then I copied the RECUVA files with the dummy portable file to the USB healthy HD. The laptop booted from the Windows Repair Live CD and command line. I ran RECUVA and scanned (bypassing the Wizard) with the "not deleted files". After several hours of scanning I got a comprehensive, correct list of the files (with double circle green-white dots), filtered for the Documents folder.

So I checked them all and hit [RECOVER] , intending to copy the files on the healthy USB connected drive BUT....

The popup window for Browse for Folder does not show any of the drives and folders within them....!

Neither C: the old HD boot disk, nor G: the USB HD.

Note :

  • at the same time command line shows both disks just fine...
  • and both disks show up inside Recuva at the top left pull down menu, with their Windows assigned drive letters

The [Make new folder] button does nothing and the [OK] is greyed out...

What is wrong?

Thank you,

Christos

Athens, Greece

PS :

I found two very similar forum posts

Cannot define recover destination and Problem with destination path

Neither one is resolved

I couldn't resolve this, which meant that I could not use Recuva.

I ended up downloading the free version of Paragon's Rescue Kit RK14. This makes it's own live CD based on Linux (unlike Recuva, you don't use a Windows Live CD and run the program).

It was faster in loading the drive and reading content, compared to Recuva.

Unlike Recuva it continued to the next step of actually recovering.

I ended up transferring about 25GB of documents, it missed a few ocassional files producing a report for them. My old disk finally gave up totally during transfer of pictures, good thing I saved those for last... I had about 15GB of pictures left to go.

PS: I replaced the HDD with a new SSD disk. SSD drives really are VERY fast, amazing!