cgsecurity.org

I'm attempting Photorec recovery from a 1TB HDD. It had a read error and was quick formatted. (I've been assured that Photorec can recover from even formatted drives but I'm not sure if the quick format made things better or worse, in any case, it's been done already.)

Photorec has been running for about 18hrs and is a little less than halfway through; it keeps getting stuck on bad sectors but it's chugging along. What worries me is that it always displays "0 files found."

Does this mean it's scanning and there's nothing there, or does it just not update? I've never run this program on a healthy disk so I don't really know what to expect. I'm willing to wait until the scan completes even if it's days from now, but I don't want to wait only to find out it's found nothing at all.

Any similar experiences? Are all the bad sectors a bad sign? I'm itching to run ChkDsk on the drive to see if I'm wasting my time or not but I don't want to cancel the scan if it has a potential to recover my files. Thanks!

Try to clone your disk using gnu ddrescue
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

Otherwise when you use PhotoRec, after selecting the partition, choose [Whole] instead of [Free].

Thanks for the reply. I did choose [Whole] on this run. While I've considered cloning the disc, I don't have any storage space for it. I have a couple external HDD but they're all quite a lot smaller than 1TB and I don't have the money to buy a new one. I know I didn't have anywhere near 1TB of data on the dead hard drive, but I can't remember how much was used before the crash.