I have a toshiba 2Tb HD which suddenly couldn't be read. Windows 7 asks me to format it. I tried using recuva (deep scan) but stopped it after 4 hours because the estimated finishing time was still rapidly flickering a variety of times of between a couple hours and 46 days. On stopping it came up with a list of 30,000 files all with green health status. I recovered these to another disk and most of them have the original name and will open however, 30,000 files in a single folder is not easy to manage.
So I tried again ticking the restore file structure option and decided to let it run to completion. After 8 hours it had reached 142% but two hours later I looked at computer and recuva was no longer running,
Three questions,
1. At what percentage does the process complete: is it 200% ?
2. If 200% is the new %100 and as (after '100%') the percentage appears to increase more or less linearly in time, why include the completion time estimate when it is rapidly changing by huge amounts even after 8 hours of processing.
3. Is there anything I can do to stop recuva aborting itself?
I am running it on an i7 computer with 16gb of RAM.
Assuming that you want to recover the live files on the drive I suggest that you go into Advanced Mode if you aren't already and check Scan for Non-Deleted Files in Options/Actions. Uncheck Deep Scan. Then run the scan. Depending on the state of the disk this might show an error. If it does then the deep scan is your only option.
You can check/uncheck Restore Folder Structure at any time after the scan, you don't have to scan again, it's a recovery option.
I don't know about the percentage figure, I guess it's some calculation glitch. I should ignore it. I've also never had Recuva chop itself, so I can't help there.
Thank you for your quick and useful reply - I will try your suggestions. I should have said that I was pleased the way Recuva recovered most of my files, albeit in a single folder, The Toshiba helpline could only suggest an expensive professional data recovery or formatting the hard drive and losing everything.
............I've now tried unchecking deep scan but I immediately got the message "can't read MFT". I guess I'll try a deep scan again for another eight hours, then stop it and see if it can recover the file structure (useful to know that this option only applies to the recovery stage),
I still wonder why the estimated time to completion flickers a few frames a second with estimate ranging from hours to days and that this doesn't converge to something sensible even after 8 hours. And does anyone know at what %tage indication the process completes - or whether this is in fact variable.