cgsecurity.org

Hello. I am trying to use PhotoRec to recover some photos on a 750GB HDD that came out of an old laptop of mine for which I had to replace the hard drive. It was running okay for about a week and recovering a variety of files, but then the other day I heard the drive making some unusual noises. After that the speed of the recovery greatly increased, but there were over 3000 directories created in the folder where I chose to save the recovered files, all containing the same photos and documents. Before the speed picked up it had gotten to 12% in about a week. Since then it has gone from 12% to 79% in 2 days. Does anyone know what happened and what I need to do from here? Thank you.

If the original disk has some bad sectors, it's better to clone it to a new empty disk using ddrescue (see https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf )
Have you been careful to not store the recovered files on the same filesystem than the source ?

Thanks for the quick response. I'm a complete novice when it comes to data recovery, so I can't say I'm 100% sure what you're asking, but I have the old hard drive hooked up to my desktop computer with a DriveWire and I'm saving the recovered files to that computer. Does that answer the question?