Running PhotoRec 6.13 on Windows 7 machine to recover files that were accidentally deleted 3 weeks ago. I am a newbie, my first experience w/PhotoRec. I downloaded PhotoRec on a different machine and copied it and associated files to an external hard drive with 150+ GB free space. Then took that external drive to the machine with the files I am trying to recover. Selected only .doc and .pdf extensions to be recovered. Started to run PhotoRec and directed recovered files to be stored on the external drive (K:\Flashrec)
At first it estimated 22 mins to completion, but that kept growing to 2+ hours. Came back in about 1.5 hours to find that 806 doc files and 161 pdf files were recovered, but progress stopped and message shown is:
"Warning: no free space available. Please select a destination to save the recovered files."The machine is running Windows 7 simultaneously, so I opened a cmd window (for dos commands) and did a dir on K:\Flashrec to see that PhotoRec had created two subdirectories recup_dir.1 and recup_dir.2, each with some hundreds of files and some hundreds of MB. I used the cmd window to make more subdirectories on the K: drive and redirect PhotoRec to save files in a new subdirectory.
Each time I do this, PhotoRec runs for a few minutes, creates a new subdirectory recup_dir.2, then stops with the same "Warning: no free space..." message. Each time PhotoRec says it is running the next Pass, i.e. Pass 2, Pass 3,... etc. The number of recoverd files stays exactly the same at 967 files. According to the free space reported by dir command, the free space diminishes by about 1 MB with each pass, but I still have 150+ GB of free space left. There are no more files appearing in any of the new subdirectories that I created and use. By now, PhotoRec says estimated time to complete is 15 hours.
Is there any point in continuing, or should I figure that I have gotten all I can get (967 recovered files) and call it quits ? Appreciate any prompt answer you could give, the computer will need to be used about 5 hours from now (at 15:00 UTC Wednesday)
Thanks
PhotoRec says no free space, but there is.
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