A friend had a problem. They dropped their 320GB external hard drive and now it says there are no files on it. I am running the latest version of Recuva on it to get the files back. It has been running for five days non-stop.
I made sure to first update Recuva before running anything. Which is why I said I have the latest version.
I ran Recuva for two days, then had to leave town for a funeral and I wanted to take my system with me. So I stopped the recovery. After two days there was a huge list of files. This was a good thing because I had feared that the program had run into a bad spot on the hard drive and that that was what was causing the long delay in the program's running. Anyway, I booted up another of my computers, updated Recuva on that one, plugged the drive in to it, and restarted the recovery process (deep scan mode). That was on Wednesday last. It has been running ever since.
My questions are : Should I stop it again and just recover the files it has found? Is there the possibility that there is some kind of a bad spot on the disk drive and so the program is doing some kind of a loop because of it that is causing the software to just run for days?
My thoughts on this are that I should stop the program and just recover what it has found in the last five days.
According to Task Manager, Recuva is using 0% CPU (however the disk drive light keeps flashing showing that it is in use) and it only has 17MB of memory used. So whatever it is doing - it isn't gobbling up a lot of memory. Which means it is maybe just doing the same thing over and over.
External USB drive. Non-system drive. Ran chkdsk against it and it did not recover any files. I've decided I've given it long enough. I'm going to stop the scan and restore the files it has found. I'll let you know what happens. :-)
Is this a system drive? You can see the drive letter in Explorer, can you see any files with Explorer? Have you run chkdsk aganist this drive?
What options are you running with Recuva? You should be running normal scan with Scan for Non-Deleted Files checked.
WOA! Hold your horses! I just checked the computer and lo-and-behold there is a single green bar and it says 3 DAYS LEFT to finish! Gack! Guess I'll let it run.
Is it certain that the computer and disc are running at full rated USB2 speed ?
On one forum I found a person who had not realized that his computer had chosen to run at USB1 speed even though both computer and drive were rated as USB2.
As far as I know it is USB2. I've checked the system's Device Manager and it is showing as USB2. I've seen when it (the system) selects USB1. I get a message "This device could run faster...". Didn't come up when the drive was attached.
Recuva is now saying it will take 44 days to complete. Green progress bar hasn't moved and I can not leave it to do that. I'm going to give it until tonight before I hit the cancel button.
I've used Recuva before in the past. Nothing like this has ever happened. I'm betting there is a bad place on the disk somewhere that is getting hit.
Ok - I finally hit the cancel button. The number of days jumped from 44 to 46 in ten minutes. There is definitely something wrong with the drive but I think it already had all of the files in the list. It is 29% through restoring the files and there are 246 files recovered so far. There are a grand total of 4096 files. A somewhat suspicious number as it is a factor of two. As I am sitting here watching Recuva is stuck at the 29% mark saying it will take 15 minutes to complete.
Final update: After recovering all of the files Recuva found on the disk drive I tried to do a quick format on the drive. That failed. So I tried a low level format and that failed as well. There is definitely something wrong with the disk drive. I'm just glad I got all of the files off of the drive I could. Thanks again for making Recuva available! A science teacher thanks you guys! :-)