Recuva seems stuck?

[SaintGrimm]

I recently accidentally erased a HDD. I did a fresh install of windows and clicked the wrong drive.

 

After 3 days of using programs that claimed to be free (I simply can't afford a program right now, I'm broke until the end of this semester when my grant refund comes in) I finally came across recuva.

 

The first time I used recuva, it seemed to get stuck at stage 1 of 3 100% 0 seconds remaining. It stayed that way for over an hour.

 

When testing to see if it was truly free, I let it get to 5% and canceled it and made sure it didn't say anything about only files of a certain size, or a total amoutn of data could be recovered without using a free version. And while searching my stuck issue, I also found a post on this forum of someone saying they always cancel it at 1 of 3 100% with no ill effects. So I did. After about 30 minutes of canceling, recuva froze up and quit responding for about 10 minutes so I gave up and just closed it out and started over.

 

I let it go over night while I was sleeping. When I woke up, it was stage 3 of 3 100%. I didn't look at much, just saw that and went to the bathroom. When I got back, it then said nothing except "calculating time left..." Nothing about a stage or anything... lasted about 30 minutes. NOW it's back to stage 1 of 3, 0% 88453 files found... over 5 hours left...

 

Why is it starting over and how can I make it work correctly?

 

 

 

EDIT: I cancelled the scan, I know where the things I need were located on the drive, so instead of scanning all of drive D: I told it to scan D:\Users\******\Pictures hoping I could get just my pictures, then go back and get the other things I need. I only need about 300GB out of a total of over 1 TB of stuff, so I was hoping that'd make it go faster... But the amount of time left is the exact same as a deep scan of all of drive D: and it says 88,453 files found again, and I didn't even have that many pictures... Do I need to do a re-install or something?