Give up - or keep scanning?

[8bit]

I have a badly corrupted/damaged 2TB Seagate GoFlex I am trying to recover "jpg" files from using Photorec.

In the first 5 seconds or so of scanning it found 57 files (yeah! I thought) - but nothing in the 8 hours since. The sector count is still advancing (very slowly) but it has not even reached 1% yet. It would probably take weeks to scan the whole drive at this rate.

This drive had ~30GB of "jpg" files on it - and was not overwritten or formatted.

Since Photorec hasn't found anything else since the initial flurry of 57 files, is it likely NOT GOING TO - or should I let it run and see what happens?

BTW - the sector count is increasing every 3 - 25 seconds in increments of about 2000 - 6000 sectors at a time. I can hear the heads in the HD moving on these intervals as well so it appears Photorec IS reading the drive. It worries me, however, that it's not finding anything.

[8bit]

OK, Photorec has been running for over two days now and has not found anything since the 57 "jpg" files recovered in the first few seconds of scanning.

It has now scanned about 20MB of the 2TB drive. The sector count is still increasing every 5 seconds or so - so I guess it's still working.

There are other files besides "jpg" on this drive (many large "wave" files, mpg video, etc.) so I am hoping Photorec will start cranking out "jpg" files when it gets to those sectors on the drive.

I'm tempted to keep going but it will take WEEKs. Is this normal?

Also, could files be ANYWHERE on that 2TB drive - or will they all be near the front?

[kathbot]

What was the overall disk use? My guess is that PhotoRec can only find contiguous and not fragmented files.

[8bit]

The drive was used as an external storage device.

[kathbot]

I mean how full was it. More full drives and longer in use drives tend to be more fragmented.

[8bit]

About 300GB total used but only about 1GB of that being the "jpg" files I'm trying to recover.

So, in other words, the files I'm trying to recover are sparse on the drive. I may have to scan for weeks to get to the sectors where they're stored.

Any suggestions on how to speed this up appreciated!

[kathbot]

If you are using USB 2.0 but have access to 3.0 it is much faster. But there's no way to logically speed up the search - you do not know WHERE those files are so you have to look through the entire drive.

[8bit]

I have removed the drive from the USB dock and connected directly to the motherboard as drive "D".

The drive is 2TB and Photorec is showing about 8000 hours to complete! It may work but is completely impractical.

[cgrenier]

It's really too slow. Do you see read error messages when processing using PhotoRec ?

[8bit]

It's really too slow. Do you see read error messages when processing using PhotoRec ?

No. It was showing a slow but continual progression through the sectors. After 56 hours or so it had scanned 20M sectors out of 3.9 billion - with no more files found.

I would send you a screen shot but I gave up and shut it off.