Recuva crashes when running Deep Scan on USB hard drive

[JerseyGigolo]

recently when i connected my external hard drive to my laptop (both my XP and Vista laptops) the drive letter would show but it appeared as unformatted.

 

the last time i had connected it, it was NTFS formatted and contained no less than 75GB of varying personal data.

 

i found recuva some weeks ago and decided to give it a try.

 

i attempted to run a scan but couldn't because the drive had no drive letter and couldn't be assigned one because it appeared to be unformatted.

 

in my exasperation i decided to quick format it using the NTFS.

 

i reattempted to run a scan and it appeared to be proceeding.

 

the scan got through somewhere between 12% and 18% of pass one.

 

it found just fewer than 100,000 files when the scan progress bar simply disappeared.

 

there are two things to note after the progress bar disappears:

 

1. the footer portion of the Recuva screen says "The semaphore timeout period has expired."

2. the hard drive's drive letter disappears and if removed and reconnected, it says it's "uninitialized". the drive must be rebooted to resolve.

 

attached is a screenshot of recuva after the error.

 

i didn't find a great deal of info on the web about this sort of error.

 

what i did find seemed to relate to large files being copied/moved.

 

what i can say is that there were/are a fair amount of *.7z files on the drive which are more than 10GB in size.

[Alan_B]

This may be too late after what you did, but it may help.

 

What you should have done first :-

 

Right click "My Computer" and select Manage;

Under storage select Disk Management;

The "pictures" for various disc drives show their partitions.

 

Simply click on any part of the external drive and right click.

Now you have the option to "Change Drive Letter".

Simply set the Drive letter as it was for each partition, and you have finished.

 

I did this 2 years ago when my external disappeared.

I cannot remember - it is possible you might have to follow with a reboot.

I had painless recovery - all files re-appeared as I had left them

 

Once you have drive letters you have probably lost the files by what you already did.

I strongly recommend that you seek further advice before you aggravate your situation.

What you cannot see today may still be restorable until you try something else.

 

Incidentally, I am very new to Recuva so I could be wrong, but your snapshot suggests to me that Recuva was scanning C:\, which is not a drive letter I would expect for an external drive.

 

Regards

Alan