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Photorec keeps restarting search.

Posted: 14 Mar 2016, 16:19
by jonnsl
Hello,

I'm trying to use photorec to recover some videos, but every time a file is found (a corrupt file actually), the search goes to back to sector 0, and the completion time jumps to something like 500h. also the pass 0 never goes through the whole hdd, it skips to pass 1 at around sector 190461804/10610098176 even though no headers were found. its this behavior normal? I left photorec running for almost 40h, it found around 100 small mpg files, all corrupt.
I'm running photorec on a LVM of 5059GiB, does this exceed the maximum "partition" size?
I'm using photorec 7.0 on archlinux.

Re: Photorec keeps restarting search.

Posted: 14 Mar 2016, 22:33
by cgrenier
Can you try using the 7.1-WIP version ?
You should also select the logical volume and not the the volume group or the physical volume.

Re: Photorec keeps restarting search.

Posted: 15 Mar 2016, 09:32
by jonnsl
Hi, thanks for the reply.
I compiled the 7.1-WIP version, and the same thing is still happening.
here is a video I recorded showing what is happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgNiNthyQiA . you can skip to 12:45 to see the search going back to the start.
by the way i'm using Linux 4.4.3-1-ARCH

also, does selecting only 1 file format makes the search less likely to return results, or less likely to guess the block size correctly?

Re: Photorec keeps restarting search.

Posted: 16 Mar 2016, 07:28
by cgrenier
Yes, it's better to only disable a filetype if there is a problem with it:
- it's harder to detect the block size when most filetype are disabled,
- recovered files are larger than they should as PhotoRec stops the recovery of a file when a new one is found, and less files are found when few filetypes are enabled

Re: Photorec keeps restarting search.

Posted: 16 Mar 2016, 15:31
by jonnsl
ok, I'm gonna try again leaving the default file options. It would be nice if you could add that to the wiki, so other people don't make the same mistake I did.

Just one more question, I only have a 500gb external hdd, obviously not enough to recover everything, can I delete some unwanted files while the search is still going?

thanks very much for the help, you have been really helpful.

Re: Photorec keeps restarting search.

Posted: 18 Mar 2016, 07:43
by cgrenier
Yes, you can delete recovered files while the recovery is still running