Very long time waiting - What to do ?

[Ainkatsiss]

Hi all

First of all i must assume my poor english capabilities... I'll try to do my best to be understandable.

 

I've had a problem with a 300Go usb disk. It was no more readable by windows (it says something like "can't access the disk"). I've started a deep sacan with Recuva on it two days ago. Now the scan is at "stage 1 of 3: Scanning the drive for deleted files Current progress: 97%, 59945 file(s) found" since more than 36h. It takes me 2-3h to go to 96%, 1h to go to 97%, and then nothing.

The estimated time left also grow up (it was 10 min remaining when i reach the 97% 36h ago, now it's 1h).

So i've got few questions:

1. How long it's reasonable to wait (i don't care waiting, but i'd prefer not waiting 1 month...) ?
2. If i need to stop the deep scan, is there something special to do after ?
3. If i restart some scan, should i do something different ?

I'll try to be as much on the forum as possible to answer the question you could have to help me.

And of course thanks a lot to everyone who will help me !

[Ainkatsiss]

A new day, but the same problem...

 

Recuva is stil blocked, exactly at the same point as yesterday (97%, 59945 files found). So Now it's quite 60h blocked at the same point.

I always have the sames questions, but i also have another:

• Should i try with another program ? If yes, which one ?

[JayDubyah]

The problem is that they cannot tell how long it will take, they guess based on the previous file sequence. From what I see, the program does not allow itself to get into endless loops. But if the rabbit trail of data writes is too long or is corrupted so it loops back into itself, they could go for hours, but like I say Recuva appears to have attempted to avoid that problem. But that is all that can be said.

I have found only one other program that I tried and it appeared to work (Easeus Data Recovery Pro) - it took almost 40 hours on a 3 T drive which was half full at least. (It really doesn't matter because they have to check every sector on that huge drive for content, catalog it somehow and then determine what sector belongs to what file and to which entry in the log. They have to determine whether or not the data they are seeing is from previously erased file or something else - it is fairly complicated. If your data is worth $70 to you go for it. 

I have only had one drive go bad in the last 20 years. My daughter has lost two in the last six months: a 1 T WD 2.5" and a 3 T Toshiba 3.5". At first I could at least see the drives, but as I have worked on them, they have deteriorated rather than improve

My question would be, why does the program not stop and ask if they can recover what they have so far periodically, so that you can be looking at how good a job they are doing and determine whether or not to continue. The answer is that they probably do not know until all of phase 1 is complete which is the major portion of their recovery. Also if the drive itself is failing because of a hardware problem, you are not going to recover anything until it begins working again. That means removing the cover (destroying the drive) and replacing parts with functional parts before recovery - then hoping that the heads were not destroyed or get destroyed by the contamination of your non-clean-room environment. If you are in that position, there are services who can recover your data for a reasonable price, but not cheap.