PhotoRec for formatted Drive (Slowwwwww)

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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andy16h
Posts: 6
Joined: 01 Dec 2012, 15:41

PhotoRec for formatted Drive (Slowwwwww)

#1 Post by andy16h »

I formatted a western digital 2tb drive that was full. I thought i had a backup of everything and it turns out that I was missing 1 directory. The drive prior to formatting was setup NTFS in the following layout.
DE
.....Folders
.....Shares
..........Photos
..........Funkys
..........Users
..........Movies
..........and so on...
The only folder I'm looking to recover is DE\Shares\Funkys

PhotoRec ran great for the first 8 hours or so and now it is moving at a snails pace and says it has 230H remaining. This time gets longer every couple of hours.
It currently says ReadingSector 605240015 / 3907029168, 3785 files found
Elapsed time 42h11m53s -estimated time to completion 230h12m16s

At 3:43 Central time yesterday 17 hours and 22 minutes ago it was here
Reading Sector 605240919 / 3907029168, 3745 files found
Elapsed time 25h03m52s

During the first hours of running you could see the reading sector ticking and and the elapsed time ticking now those do not move and if you come back and check after an hour the time and sector will have changed. The sector moves backwards alot.

Is this something that I need to let run and it might take a month or is there a problem. If there is a problem what is the best way to resolve as I would really like to avoid starting over.
CPU usage 12%
Memory Usage 2.19 gb of 4 gb being used

andy16h
Posts: 6
Joined: 01 Dec 2012, 15:41

Re: PhotoRec for formatted Drive (Slowwwwww)

#2 Post by andy16h »

I stopped it and restarted and told it not to search for the video files, photo files or music files. These types of files were the majority of the data that was on the hard drive and I already have a copy of it. PhotoRec started running really fast and I was hopeful that this would fix the problem. But it seems to be moving at a snails pace again and it has happened at sector 605198101 which is about the same place the problem started last time.

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cgrenier
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Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 15:08
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Re: PhotoRec for formatted Drive (Slowwwwww)

#3 Post by cgrenier »

There is probably a fragmented file at this location that PhotoRec thinks should be bigger. Each time PhotoRec saves a file after this one, it probably checks that it can now recover the previous file with the correct size.

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