cgsecurity.org

Hi All,

Firstly, great piece of software for recovery of files, seems to be one of the better ones I have tried in the past few days

My problem is my SSD in the laptop died. Was using the laptop as normal and then everything froze, nothing would work so power cycled it, which then resulted in Windows 10 getting stuck in a boot loop and seeing the same splash screen, before restarting and going back to the BIOS screen and then loading Windows.

Realising that the SSD was probably dying, I pulled it out, got myself a new SSD and a USB adaptor to read the existing SSD, so I could pull the files off it, but it seems when connecting up, Windows showed the drive as uninitialised and if you tried to initialise it, an error about IO, so realised things were a little more terminal than I thought

Downloaded photorec went through creating a log etc.. but seems that it couldn't see any partitions on the drive at all, so started the scan, the pass 0 took a long time to find 10 headers (was around 5hrs) and now that it has started on pass 1 it's found some files, so left this running overnight and looking this morning it has found the following:

386 exe
193 png
193 tx?
193 txt
193 class

Looking in the recur_dir especially at the png files, they are all exactly the same (Skype logo), so is something up with the scan or is my SSD really on it's last legs? The sector count is going up, but still seems to pull the same files off the disk. Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated

Which version of Photorec do you use?

recuperation wrote: ↑06 May 2021, 10:37 Which version of Photorec do you use?

Using 7.1 and using the commandline to do the recovery

Any difference in behaviour with 7.2?

recuperation wrote: ↑06 May 2021, 10:42 Any difference in behaviour with 7.2?

Haven't tried 7.2, but can give it a go and report back

Just to update this, I tired with 7.2 and the pass 0 had run for 10 hours and still had 2000+hrs to go, so stopped this and made a call to a data recovery company for them to retrieve the data. Time isn't on my side as I need to recover my wife's coursework sooner rather than later.

It's a shame as I can see the potential in PhotoRec and is something I will look to use in the future.

Appreciate the initial help too!

Thanks.

When dealing with dammaged storage the first thing to do is to duplicate the drive as a whole with ddrescue as described in the manual.
Photorec isn't built to deal with defective drives.

You did not tell how big your drive was, but another 2000 hours runtime seems to indicates a problem.
As for the potential, I see a lot of it in you!

Thanks recuperation.

I noticed about ddrescue last night and played around with it and after 2 hours of it running, nothing had been created and had lots of read errors, which is when I called time on it and go for the professional route before it is too late. Drive was 256GB, but yeah 2000+ hours is crazy and does indicate to a problem