Stuck recovering a file

Recuva
1

Hi.

I am trying out Recuva for the first time. So far everything has gone smoothly and relatively quickly.

Some quick back ground:

After starting windows 7 I was promted to do a chkdsk before booting up. Thought nothing of it and said yes. As the chkdsk completed I saw a stream of deleting file messages. UG!

I checked my D drive and sure enough over 400G was gone.

In comes Recuva to the rescue, I hope.

I did a deep scan, enabled almost everything and amazingly the scan found about 500000 files in the estimated 4hrs. Awesome! Loving this product.

Sadly it did not find most of the file structure. chkdsk most have done something very wrong.

Now I selected to recover to a 1.5TB drive and I got a nice window estimating 11hrs. Everything kicked off and 45 files reappeared right away. Then it hit one file and has been stuck on this file for 4hrs. I can hear the drives running but nothing else has shown up even though the popup currently says 40% complete. Is this typical or has something gone wrong?

The file name freaks me out as well.

E:\$BadClus

Thanks in advance!

2

Your problem might be in 'enabled almost everything'. If you checked Scan for Non-Deleted Files then that's what you will get, all your live files as well as those deleted. Among the live files will be a set of system files beginning with $, including $BadClus. These system files are not normally deleted, and although they can be recovered (in as much as a copy can be written elsewhere), they can't be used for any recovery purposes. I think that $BadClus is a sparse file, which means that on recovery it will attempt to recover the expanded size, which is all the disk space.

I should cancel the recovery. Still with the existing scan, uncheck Scan for Non-Del etc. There should now be many tens or hundreds of thousands of files fewer to recover. Now run your recovery on what's left.

3

Thanks. I did eventually start moving. Now the slow process of fixing what could not be recovered.