madkiwi Posted February 20, 2018 Share Posted February 20, 2018 I had a very bizarre issue with a Western Digital My Book Home 500 GB. I started getting I/O errors, and could not figure it out. Scandisk was unable to complete. I figured I would try re-formatting, and see if that helped, but purchased a new external drive just in case (drive was a backup destination for my desktop and my laptop, plugged into a router). It completed the quick format, reporting 465 GB available, but still had I/O errors. Wasn't until after I did the format that I discovered that somehow I had backed up a folder full of photos to the WD and then deleted them from the original hard drive. Whoops. Downloaded Recuva, found nothing on quick scan, started deep scan and seemed like it ran for about 2 minutes (0% complete) then showed it found 234 files but it could not actually save them anywhere. Was going to send the drive to Ontrack, but noticed that the WD power adapter was awfully warm, and that the leds on the drive would occasionally go out. So I found another adapter (wife also has the WD My Book) and... you can guess the rest. I tried re-running Recuva in quick mode, could not find anything, so I selected deep scan. Within an hour it was telling me it was 10% complete, and had found 102,xxx files. It also said it was going to take another 16 hours to complete. That was 24 hours ago, it is currently 39% complete, 103,694 files found. At 11pm last night (12 hours ago) it was 30%, same number of files. Estimated time left is currently 1 day. So how long should this take? The drive is plugged directly into my desktop (not the router), the drive itself is only USB 2.0 even though my PC is USB 3.0 and if I had to guess the drive had about 280 GB on it when the mishap occurred. Possibly the 103,694 files are all the ones that were on there. If I hit cancel on the scan now will it let me recover the 103K files it already found or will it go back to the main menu? Appreciate any help or advice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted February 21, 2018 Author Share Posted February 21, 2018 OK, 24 hours later and it is now at 63%, 353,834 files found. So it has been running now for about 48 hours. Estimated time remaining says 1 day. Seems legit. Would there have been an easier (faster) way to do this? I guess the thing to do should have been to use the optional setting "Scan for non-deleted files" but too late now. But more importantly- is this still normal? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Nergal Posted February 21, 2018 Moderators Share Posted February 21, 2018 Yes, relatively normal, it's a big drive and will take some time. Scan for non-deleted is an option to use if you're trying to recover from a formatted disc. ADVICE FOR USING CCleaner'S REGISTRY INTEGRITY SECTION DON'T JUST CLEAN EVERYTHING THAT'S CHECKED OFF. Do your Registry Cleaning in small bits (at the very least Check-mark by Check-mark) ALWAYS BACKUP THE ENTRY, YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU'LL BREAK IF YOU DON'T. Support at https://support.ccleaner.com/s/?language=en_US Pro users file a PRIORITY SUPPORT via email support@ccleaner.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted February 24, 2018 Author Share Posted February 24, 2018 It has now been 4 days, 11 hours. 86% and 515,984 files found. Estimated time left is 17 hours, but it has been saying that for the last 3 hours. So I am going to guess 2 days left to be on the safe side. Hope we don't have a power outage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted February 24, 2018 Moderators Share Posted February 24, 2018 This is phemonenally long for (I have to disagree with Nergal) what is nowdays such a small drive. I have a 256 gb drive with 80+ gb free and a very old PC and a deep scan takes about 40 minutes. So a 500 gb drive should take - lets be very generous - three hours or so. The USB connection will probably slow the process down, but I don't know by how much. Not six days, that's taking the micky. I don't know what Recuva is doing internally, it should be reading each unused cluster and searching for a recognisable file header, then building some sort of tables in memory. That's not too onerous. It seems that for some drives, or some conditions of a drive, it gets into a loop. Can it really do mass multiple reads on many clusters before moving on? Maybe, but six days? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted February 24, 2018 Author Share Posted February 24, 2018 I thought the extended time may have something to do with a combination of the drive having possible read/write errors AND me formatting it. I'll report back when it finishes, now at 91% and estimating 12 hours remaining. Has not reported any new files found since Thursday. madkwi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted February 26, 2018 Author Share Posted February 26, 2018 OK, sometime overnight the scan finished. After 161 hours, 42 minutes and 25 seconds Recuva found 341,640 recoverable files in Excellent condition. I do not know what happened to the other 170,000 odd files it thought it found earlier. It is currently recovering them to a new drive. Many of the files were not needing to be recovered, but manually checking a couple hundred thousand boxes seems remarkably inefficient. I can sort them later. Guessing the recovery will take a while, after 5 minutes 830 files have been recovered and it is still calculating the estimated time remaining. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted February 28, 2018 Author Share Posted February 28, 2018 Latest update- now been 33 hours since I started the recovery operation. At the moment it is 39% complete, with 67,395 files recovered. Estimating 2 days remaining. I have spot checked maybe 25 files so far (a mixture of PDF and JPG) and not found any that were un-viewable. So that's good. Will report back in another day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted February 28, 2018 Moderators Share Posted February 28, 2018 You certainly get the prize for perseverance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted March 1, 2018 Author Share Posted March 1, 2018 17 hours ago, Augeas said: You certainly get the prize for perseverance. Like I had a choice! I am just grateful we've had no power issues since I started... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted March 2, 2018 Author Share Posted March 2, 2018 OK, recovery completed (in 75 hours 23 minutes and 41 seconds). Total of 67,396 files. 67,032 fully recovered 364 partials. Not worried about those, it was very apparent that there were many deleted files on the drive (because I was doing incremental backups to this drive older files were replaced) so anything overwritten was something I had no need for. Probably take another few days to sort out which ones are not needed, but looks like I recovered all the photos I lost. While slow, I can't say too much bad about the software. Except it would be nice if the recovered files didn't just get dumped into one big folder, it would be more helpful for them to be put in the original folder structure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted March 2, 2018 Moderators Share Posted March 2, 2018 Well, that must be a relief. You have to be adnired for sticking at it. Files found with a deep scan (those with [01234].ext name) can't be ordered by folder structure as that info is held in the MFT, which the deep scan bypasses. Good luck with the sort. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madkiwi Posted March 2, 2018 Author Share Posted March 2, 2018 5 hours ago, Augeas said: Well, that must be a relief. You have to be adnired for sticking at it. Files found with a deep scan (those with [01234].ext name) can't be ordered by folder structure as that info is held in the MFT, which the deep scan bypasses. Good luck with the sort. What about files with J:\?\ in the path? Does this indicate the file was deleted or unknown folders? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted March 2, 2018 Moderators Share Posted March 2, 2018 Just to clarify, a deep scan runs a normal scan first so there will be files listed with file and folder names. Everything before the first [00001].ext file is from the normal scan. The normal scan takes info from the MFT. Each folder has an record in the MFT, that's the only place where they exist. Folders with a ? in the name mean that the record for the (deleted) folder has been reused, so the MFT record for the file is unable to chain back to the root. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mo wahid Posted March 21, 2018 Share Posted March 21, 2018 On 28/02/2018 at 05:13, madkiwi said: Latest update- now been 33 hours since I started the recovery operation. At the moment it is 39% complete, with 67,395 files recovered. Estimating 2 days remaining. I have spot checked maybe 25 files so far (a mixture of PDF and JPG) and not found any that were un-viewable. So that's good. Will report back in another day. i had the same problem how do i retrieve it, i have stored on the external hard drive and none of the jpeg is reading and and the word documents., i have paid for the software and the technical support is not responding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mo wahid Posted March 21, 2018 Share Posted March 21, 2018 On 02/03/2018 at 19:06, Augeas said: Just to clarify, a deep scan runs a normal scan first so there will be files listed with file and folder names. Everything before the first [00001].ext file is from the normal scan. The normal scan takes info from the MFT. Each folder has an record in the MFT, that's the only place where they exist. Folders with a ? in the name mean that the record for the (deleted) folder has been reused, so the MFT record for the file is unable to chain back to the root. i can see the files has been found but can i open it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ameenymous Posted January 27, 2019 Share Posted January 27, 2019 Madkiwi, I appreciate the amount of patience you have shown in the given situation. I own a WD 2TB Hdd which apparently out of nowhere decided not to show up in My PC. Give or take 5 hours of hassle and decided to format it. The drive shows up now but i had approx 1.5 TB of data out of which 600 MB was vip data that i need. Its been 12 hours now. Still at stage 1. With 31% progress and 81,701 files found. Estimated time varies from 15 hrs to 1 day. Based on your trajectory I have an intense battle to fight jn the coming week. Had it not been your post I was sceptical of going through with it. Will be lucky if I get all the files though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Andavari Posted January 27, 2019 Moderators Share Posted January 27, 2019 That's one reason an internal backup drive needs to also itself get backed up to an external USB storage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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