Two Problems and a General Question

[Sebastian Mares]

Hello!

 

I noticed that Recuva has two critical problems while trying to recover several (ca. 800) files from a NTFS partition with a total size of ca. 200 GB. The first time I start Recuva, scan the desired partition and attempt a recovery, everything works fine. However, if I try to recover more files after the first recovery process finished, the files recovered, while having the correct name and size, are corrupt. Even rescanning the partition again and attempting a recovery afterwards doesn't help. However, if I close the program, start it again, scan and attempt to recover the files, everything works well. To make reproduce, follow these steps:

 

Start Recuva and scan a partition

Let's say you have the files A, B, C, D and E in perfect condition for recovery

Select A, B and C and tell Recuva to recover on a partition / drive of choice

After the recovery process finishes, select D and E and also choose to recover

A, B and C from the first run are OK, D and E however are corrupt

 

Now close Recuva, start it again and scan the partition again

Once again, it finds A, B, C, D and E in perfect condition for recovery

Select D and E and let Recuva recover the files

The recovered files are in order now

 

Another problem I've noticed: choosing all 800 files (200 GB) for recovery didn't work because Recuva stopped after 125 files telling me that they were recovered successfully. Maybe this is related to this: http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=12391

 

Now to the general question: is it possible to recover files on a partition without copying to a different destination? AFAIK, deleted files are only marked as "overwritable" - is it possible to just remove that flag? I guess you can imagine how long it would take to recover my 200 GB of data accidentally removed if Recuva copied the files one after another - besides, I don't even have a second HDD with that much free space.