Recuva

This program messed my desktop pc, and caused me to have to disconnect one of my hdd. Not a happy camper, be careful about using the program to create a disc image, gave me nothing but trouble. Most of my equipment on this machine fairly new and had no trouble with it before using Recuva, buyer beware! Have Norton complete anti-virus protection too!

Moved to recuva bug board

Creating a disc image in Recuva can take a long time (16 hours plus is not unusual) because it has to read and then re-write the whole of the disc including the 'unused' space.

During the imaging process the computer cannot be used and once started the image creation cannot be safely stopped.

https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/204044064-Using-the-Recuva-Wizard#h_15c980c2-23ca-47e0-b818-67778267902b

You don't say exactly what happened; but from what you do say it sounds as if you forced the imaging process to crash by disconnecting the drive that it was writing the image to.

Crashing an active process unexpectedly like that, especially one that may be accessing things at the system level, is not a good idea and can lead to problems.

(Sometimes it's the only way - but you always risk problems by doing it).