Recuva stuck in file recovery?

[Ian S]

HI all,

Last week my external HDD hard drive died. First off, I have huge issues to get it connected and recognised by windows7 at all, but eventually I found that it was only recognised as RAW. After a bit of internet search I found Recuva and also learned to handle the initial issues.
 

- By now I always skip the second and third step of the deep scan, as it would get stuck on it. With that I get my files that used to be on the hard drive, beautifully listed.

- I also have disabled USB hub time out/send to sleep, to avoid the hard drive spinning down due to "not being used".

- If I would uncheck "Scan for Non-Deleted Files", I only end up with a small amount of unfamiliar files, all my personal images and files must have been lost in the reformatting incident?

 

Regardless of all this, when I try to recover a file, even a single jpeg image, it won't even start the recovery process and will be stuck at 0%.

Any ideas what I can do? What is the normal recovery time frame for a few images? Any help is very welcome.

[AngelArcherWasRight]

Did you reinstall windows after formating ?

How did the hard drive die ?
The data you lost might be on a dead platter , the data you see on a surviving platter maybe...
some hard drives were known to have such failures. Part of the data unrecoverable, could be explained by a dead platter among the lot inside the HDD.

For the duration of scan I am  not sure... but depends on the size of the hard drive to give an estimate,

an 8 gig sd card could take an hour with deep search  I think

Edited September 11, 2020 by AngelArcherWasRight

[Ian S]

I have no issues with scanning for lost files, I am struggling to recover the lost files.

To answer your questions:

I didn't format anything (yet), and why would I reinstall Windows?

As for the hard drive dying: One day I noticed that the hard drive was still running despite the PC being turned off (external power supply), so I unplugged it (shouldn't have done that). Afterwards it was not accessible anymore and probably reformatted to RAW due to this incident.

 

What has happened since then is that I actually got a recovery process going. It was painfully slow and took over 12 full days for a single folder of images and a few short videos... but it reported zero files as recovered the whole time, never gave me a final report and all that was recovered was the original folder structure and a few "empty" jpeg files.

Can images actually be recovered if they are part of the "non-deleted" section?