cgsecurity.org

I've seen a lot of threads about looping but I haven't found one that is consistent with the issues I'm seeing. I have a healthy disk that was in a Seagate Personal Cloud NAS that became bricked after accidentally plugging it into the wrong power adapter. I removed the disk and it's perfectly functional which indicated that the issue was with the NAS circuitry and not the drive. After days of trying many solutions I stumbled upon TestDisk and later PhotoRec. TestDisk unfortunately could not see the files on the partition even though it found them, but PhotoRec is doing so very successful... but... It keeps looping over the same sectors over and over again. With each successive loop it finds new files, but it seems that it is looping back to recover 3-5 files that it finds be never recovers. With each successive loop the ETA also increases. I captured the desktop to show the loop, sorry it's 20 minutes, although you don't have to watch much to see it list a file and then un-list the file. I've seen recommendations to edit a file to exclude the sectors in the loop but I'm not sure if that will help me with recovery because it's not stuck, it's just progressing very slowly. I have limited the file extensions I'm attempting recover because there is a whole lot of crap on the drive I don't need to recover. Any suggestions or feedback would be greatly appreciated!

https://youtu.be/ctaaQqMuH0k

In 20 minutes, it looks like a single file has been found. As PhotoRec tries to restore the original date/time (ie. doc files), the file doesn't show as the most recent.
You can stop PhotoRec (choose Stop, not the little cross), backup the photorec.ses file, edit the file with wordpad or notepad++, remove the sector ranges before the actual location.
Restart PhotoRec and choose the resume the recovery. This will prevent PhotoRec from going to previous location.

does files from previous locations that are incomplete will never be completed and thus lost if i delete previous sector ranges?

Yes, removing sector range from photorec.ses files means no extra files will be recovered from this range. Files already found remain.

alright thanks for the answer !

i have one last question though :

what can happen if i delete one of the incomplete files in a recupdir folder while photorec is stopped?

again thank you for your amazing work !

When you stop PhotoRec, it should delete the file it was writing to and resume with the recovery of this file.