Recuva Stuck on cancelling after 19 hours of finding files

[April01]

I ran Recuva on my old windows 7 PC, had to leave it to run through the night and all day yesterday, it needed 17 hours after the first two hours that it was trying to calculate time left.  Got up today and it said 100% but still on that screen that says stage 1, over 24,000,000 files found and no way to get to the part where I can save them.  Google searched and the answer was seemingly to cancel and the files would then show up for saving.  Now it's been stuck on cancelling for over an hour.  Yes I am sitting here with an empty external hard drive to save them to but I need the screen that allows me to do that.

[April01]

Would have loved a solution to this, I have 4 PC's to do and using the free version on the first one was a test, I'm not paying if this is going to be what I get.

[nukecad]

Paying for Pro does not change what the recovery does.

But having to recover lost files from 4 different PC's seems somewhat unusual.

Could you explain what it is that you are attempting to do? ie. why 4 machines.

[April01]

59 minutes ago, nukecad said:

Paying for Pro does not change what the recovery does.

But having to recover lost files from 4 different PC's seems somewhat unusual.

Could you explain what it is that you are attempting to do? ie. why 4 machines.

Weird question, I wouldn't find that unusual.  I mean what if I worked in a PC shop or something?  Yes I have 2 old PC's (1 XP the other windows 7), 1  laptop (vista), and the other an external drive (Maxthon), they are all old.  The first one I tried was the windows 7 PC, which comes up with over 1million files, then it doesn't let me save them (recover them), I try cancelling to start again and it does nothing.  17 hours each time and I've tried 3 times so far but have given up.  I sit for an hour (after it says it has found all the files) and nothing happens so I have to close down, i.e. restart my machine with a hard shut down.  I create content for gaming.  I am unable to find the work files for some CC that I remember, hence searching my old computers for them.  No I never did throw them away and I'm glad I didn't.  The external hard drive has yielded some results and I know for a fact that many of the things I'm looking for are on this windows 7 PC.

Sadly I did think the pro version might be better which leads me to wonder why people pay for it at all then.

It would be fab to get a tip on how I can recover the files it finds.  Yes I have read through the forum.

 

[nukecad]

Thanks,

So you just want the files that were saved on the old hard drives.

A recovery tool is not the tool to use for that - unless the files you are looking for had been deleted.

 Have/had you tried simply copying the files from the old drives?

You will probably need to take the drives out and put them in an external enclosure, or use a connecting lead if you have one.

You may need more than one enclosure/leads depending on the age of the PC/drive - Older drives will have IDE connections, newer drives will have SATA connections.

Then you just plug it into a USB port and Windows 8/10/11 will read what is on the drive so you can copy it elsewhere if you want to.

By using a recovery tool you are searching for everything that has ever been saved to the drive and then later deleted. That can be thousands or millions of previous files, most of which will not be recoverable anyway because they have been overwritten by later files.

[April01]

19 hours ago, nukecad said:

Thanks,

So you just want the files that were saved on the old hard drives.

A recovery tool is not the tool to use for that - unless the files you are looking for had been deleted.

 Have/had you tried simply copying the files from the old drives?

You will probably need to take the drives out and put them in an external enclosure, or use a connecting lead if you have one.

You may need more than one enclosure/leads depending on the age of the PC/drive - Older drives will have IDE connections, newer drives will have SATA connections.

Then you just plug it into a USB port and Windows 8/10/11 will read what is on the drive so you can copy it elsewhere if you want to.

By using a recovery tool you are searching for everything that has ever been saved to the drive and then later deleted. That can be thousands or millions of previous files, most of which will not be recoverable anyway because they have been overwritten by later files.

Yes obviously they were deleted, otherwise, I could have just copied them to a new external hard drive.  Why on earth would I need to take the hard drives out when the PC's are working fine but just old operating systems, hence my upgrades.  I am trying to use recuva exactly as I should, running it on an old PC to find deleted files.  I tried recovering from C, I tried just recycle bin (deleted from).  No luck.  What gets me is that it's a windows 7 PC I'm having this trouble with, not that old.  The old Maxthon external did yield some results and yes that had to be put in a new external enclosure at a cost of £40.

 

Yes I am trying to use this product as per the instructions, no the PC and hard drive in it are not broken.