Recuva 1.15.327 hangs during recovery

[beerslayer]

Hi, all -

 

I'm having a problem where Recuva 1.15.327 hangs early in the recovery process. The scan (quick, not deep) goes smoothly, and the analysis results in about 22000 files found, about 70% of which have a prognosis of "Excellent". I select all of the "Excellent" files and hit Recover... and it starts to recover the files, but anywhere from 1% to 26% of the way through the recovery, it hangs. I've waited two hours and seen no change in the recovery progress. I've manually gone through the list of files to recover and made sure there were no huge ones there (no .VOBs, no pagefile.sys, etc.), but it doesn't seem to make any difference.

 

I don't know what other information might be useful to track down this hang. I'm using Recuva in a rather unusual situation that it doesn't really claim to work under - my sister's hard drive was partially reformatted by mistake, and now the partition shows up in Windows Explorer but claims it needs to be formatted when clicked upon. But the scan and analysis proceed as smoothly as if the drive were normal - the only problem is during the recovery.

 

I tried deep scan once and that hung during the scan process itself. Could it be running out of memory somehow? It's the only application running at the time so that seems unlikely.

 

Also, I don't know if this is significant... the hard drive I'm trying to recover was formerly a Windows XP boot drive, but is now the second drive in a Windows 2000 machine while I try to recover it.

[Augeas]

Where are you recovering to? If you are attempting to recover 70% of 22000 files that's over 15000 files, and if you're recovering to the same drive it's just about inevitable that you will be writing files on top of those waiting to be recovered. Don't do anything active on the data disk.

 

Not all the files marked as excellent will be recoverable, as Recuva is software trying to interpret data and will not always be correct. But this should not stop a mass recovery.

 

Recovering 15k+ files is an enormous task. Try recovering - to a separate folder on a different drive - in blocks of say 1k at a time. If you do recover 15k files then I don't envy whoever has to sort them out.

[beerslayer]

1) I know better than to try to recover files to the same drive. I have been scrupulously careful throughout the entire recovery attempt (before and after trying Recuva) not to write anything whatsoever to the "bad" drive. I wouldn't even let the OS attempt to boot from it.

 

2) I don't care about sorting through them - I welcome that challenge, IF I can get them all back in the first place.

 

3) It's irrelevant how many files are there. The recovery utility (in this case, Recuva) should not hang/crash during recovery. At the very least, if there's a problem, there should be an error message of some sort. If it gets stuck on one file, it should flag that file and move on to the next one.

 

Additional info: during a deep scan attempt, it sometimes fails with the message "Data error - cyclic redundancy check" rather than hanging. When this happens, the scan stops. I think it should complete scanning the drive and flag the file that generated the error.

[Augeas]

3) It's irrelevant how many files are there. The recovery utility (in this case, Recuva) should not hang/crash during recovery.

That may be so, but if recovery in one go fails then why not try to recover in smaller chunks?