I had a hard drive crash on my work computer last week due to bad sectors on the drive. The drive capacity was 160 GB with about 100 GB used. There were a handful of semi-important files that were not backed up elsewhere that I wanted to retrieve. I replaced the drive in the computer and plugged the bad drive into an SATA to USB adapter which I plugged into a USB port on the computer. Besides not being able to boot into Windows from the drive (I got a blue screen of death part way into the bootup process that said UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME), I also could not access the drive when plugged into a couple of different computers. Windows sometimes just timed out when trying to mount the drive, and other times saw the drive as needing to be formatted. Similarly, Linux could not mount the drive. Also, running chkdsk several times on the drive always found lots of bad sounding problems.
I used Recuva 1.33.451 with the "Deep scan" and "Scan for non-deleted files" options selected to successfully retrieve the files from the drive. It took a long time to scan and then copy the files, but it worked. Thanks for this great piece of software!
I'd like to suggest that you evaluate your choice of sorting algorithm used when sorting the scan result list by column. Since I only wanted to retrieve non-deleted files, and there seems to be no way to filter the results list to show only non-deleted files, I worked around the situation by first sorting on the "State" column such that all of the "Not deleted" files were grouped together which I was able to multi-select and check their checkboxes. Then, I sorted by size so that I could relatively easily uncheck some large unneeded files such as the Windows virtual memory file, hibernate file, junk in the recycle bin, other system files, intermediate compiler output files, and downloaded files and installers that I no longer needed, etc.
This interface worked okay in this way with the notable exception that sorting the scan results list which contained a little over 1.5 million entries by clicking on the column headings took quite a long time to run (> 10 minutes each time) and consumed most of the CPU on the computer for the entire time. It seems that a better sorting algorithm could be used to vastly improve the sort response time. Please consider using a better sorting algorithm for the scan results list in future versions of Recuva. Thank you. (As a side note, adding a feature to show only non-deleted files would be very helpful as well.)