Ok so here is the deal. I switched my computer to standby disconnected the external NTFS harddrive of mine and urned it back on elsewhere. I got an error about delayed write failure to the $MFT (master file table) and when I reconnected the drive it showed up and RAW unformatted. So I Quick formatted it to NTFS and proeceded to run a deep scan with recuva (which took the night). Once done It found all of my files just as I left them, there were many that were poor claiming to be overwritten by files that are not on the drive which confuses me but that aside i selected everything I wanted and proceeded to restore to another drive. To my dismay all the files from all the folders on the drive are being piled into the folder I specified.. It will take me days maby even weeks to sort all of those files out. Every file that I resotred had the original directory path shown in recuva is there any way to restore all of the files into their original directory structure? Example. Restore K:\Music\artist\album\song.mp3 to H:\recovered\Music\artist\album\song.mp3 rather than H:\recovered\song.mp3
Unfortunately I know of no automatic way to do this. What you could do is sort the Recuva output by path name, build up directory structures on your recovery drive to match the paths found, select all files from a particular path and restore them to the corresponding folder. Continue until fed up.
Hmm this would still take a considerable amount of time as the drive contained about 15000 files and 100's of folders. Is there anyway to get recuva to export its results or is there a cache of the results somewhere that I can pull? I can make a program to do the work for me no problem, but i need the data in a form I can use. So long story short does recuva sore a list of results (maby a temp file?) somewhere or can it output such a list?
I think I have solved my problem. I found an option to "restore directory structure" unfortionatly on attempting to recover i got device not ready error. I will perform another deep scan and make another attempt with restore directory structure on and see how that goes.
Well I'll be. I knew this option existed, but for some reason I didn't think it did what it said. I've just tried a test and it does indeed recreate the folder structure. Go for it!