New Acer deleted files without prior warning on a external hard drive

Cottage_Economy

Definitely not a new external hard drive!

We have found a couple of more photos of some guy giving cheesy grins and the thumbs up while flying his model aircraft. The 'engineering components' are the undercarriage struts of a model aircraft.

Ok tavernman, will select full scan and leave it to scan for the day.


I wonder what other photos are going to come to light!

Cottage_Economy

This looks a lot more promising.


It's recovered 3000 jpgs so far and they all appear to be ours.


Thank you so much tavernman.

Syman

Would just like to chip in about Tavernman's posts. you Sir, are a top bloke.

no panic, no judgemental "you should have backed up" rubbish. Just calm, easy to understand and follow instruction.

Cottage_Economy

ok...new issue has cropped up.

The computer put itself to sleep. When I woke it up and checked I discovered that the recovery program had stopped. I checked the documents recovered and the last file saved was 35 minutes before. According to the time clock the search had been running around 50 minutes and the estimated time to recovery completion was another 22hrs.

The program wouldn't respond to commands to quit so I closed the program and restarted it.

It asked me if I wanted to continue with the previous search, so I said yes. At which point it scanned for 1 second, found one more jpg then stopped and has not started again. It appears to be stuck.

PhotoRec 7.0-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, January 2015
Christophe GRENIER <[EMAIL="grenier&#64;cgsecurity.org"]grenier@cgsecurity.org[/EMAIL]>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Disk /dev/sdb - 160 GB / 149 GiB (RO) - Hitachi HTS545016B9A300
Partition Start End Size in sectors
No partition 0 0 1 19457 80 63 312581808 [Whole disk]

Pass 0 - Reading sector 12514783/312581808, 1 files found
Elapsed time 0h00m01s - Estimated time to completion 0h00m23
jpg: 1 recovered

tavernman

Hmm bl**dy power options , how many files are in the recup directory thus far? and how much space have you got left on your C: drive . You may have to run through again from the beginning , but make sure that the PC does not allow sleep when plugged in....it is found in the power options. I haven't got access to a Windows PC at the moment to check .

Cottage_Economy

tavernman wrote: »

Hmm bl**dy power options , how many files are in the recup directory thus far? and how much space have you got left on your C: drive . You may have to run through again from the beginning , but make sure that the PC does not allow sleep when plugged in....it is found in the power options. I haven't got access to a Windows PC at the moment to check .

I'll go and do that now. space on C drive 419gb. The first part of the search yielded 8,543 files across 12 directories. The vast majority are photo files, very few .docs and .xls, of which I know there were hundreds if not thousands. Presumably they are on the next bit of the search, if it ever gets a crack on with it.

It's trying to do something, but not while I'm watching. It's like a game of hide and seek...no movement on time or sector when I look. There are two more jpgs in the recovery directory than it claims it has found so something is going on.

I'll leave it for a bit and see what else it finds, but there should be significantly more documents to come.

PhotoRec 7.0-WIP, Data Recovery Utility, January 2015
Christophe GRENIER <[EMAIL="grenier&#64;cgsecurity.org"]grenier@cgsecurity.org[/EMAIL]>
http://www.cgsecurity.org
Disk /dev/sdb - 160 GB / 149 GiB (RO) - Hitachi HTS545016B9A300
Partition Start End Size in sectors
No partition 0 0 1 19457 80 63 312581808 [Whole disk]

Pass 0 - Reading sector 12540037/312581808, 1 files found
Elapsed time 0h17m57s - Estimated time to completion 7h09m29
jpg: 1 recovered

spud17

Stick with it, you're getting there.
I've used Testdisk to recover a failing drive belonging to a friend.
You do get thousands of files, including many that are of no use e.g. icons from a web page.
It will take time to sort them.
(I ended up with a red face, because some of his deleted .jpegs were rather *candid* shots).

Cottage_Economy

spud17 wrote: »

Stick with it, you're getting there.
I've used Testdisk to recover a failing drive belonging to a friend.
You do get thousands of files, including many that are of no use e.g. icons from a web page.
It will take time to sort them.
(I ended up with a red face, because some of his deleted .jpegs were rather *candid* shots).

How long did i take?

At the moment, it's telling me it will still take 128hrs to complete....it's still finding the odd file but barely any .doc or .xls files.

gjchester

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

How long did i take?

At the moment, it's telling me it will still take 128hrs to complete....it's still finding the odd file but barely any .doc or .xls files.

From experience if you get huge estimated times to finish it's an indication that the software is encountering errors and having to retry sectors multiple times.

Whatever comes out of this I would strongly suggest the drive is retired or returned for replacement as at it sounds like it has "issues"..

Cottage_Economy

gjchester - that makes sense. I'll buy another. No, I'll buy two. that way when I muck it up again I have a back up.


It's speeded up a lot now. Down to a respectable 9rs 30.