Without getting into all the details, I'm at a point now where I'm trying to do a brute force recovery on a WD 2TB 7200RPM drive using the photorec tool bundled with TestDisk in Windows 7 onto an identical WD 2TB drive. Both the source drive and target drive are new, good drives. One drive contains the image of a drive that failed (and hopefully other data that was overwritten when I attempted to clone the drive that was failing onto it -- doh).

However, the longer program runs, the longer the estimated completion time becomes. Presently there is an estimated completion time of 242 hours, and it has only been running for 23 minutes. I'm not sure if the sector value should be increasing or not, because presently it's hopping around 6200000/3907029168, but not really increasing or decreasing. It has also been stuck at 4471 files found -- and that value hasn't changed at all.



I could really use some help here and would be happy to provide more details. A google search provided some hope that PhotoRec will get out of this cycle on its own...

the estimated time generally is based on how it is performing at that moment and is variable. If you have one bad reading head, during attempted reads of this area it assumes all the surface is the same and time until completion will be significantly higher than areas without read errors.

Ultimately though, as it obviously does have problems reading there is some problem that needs to be addressed. The longer the attempted recovery runs and the drive continues to degrade, the more chance of some serious failure. Also, the recovery you are making is for RAW files only, which finds RAW data based on signatures of files. Ideally, in a more professional environment, stability would be maintained and data extracted from directory structures using specific hardware and software. If this is not an option, at least consider cloning it which will at the very least take some of the strain off it.

Unless the data isn't even worth at least $300, I suggest you stop and send the original drive to a professional data recovery lab who will not only do the recovery faster, but they will likely recover the file structure too.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

So after posting this, photorec did eventually continue on to more sectors. It ran for a little over a day and I've recovered about 615GB of data so far. It got stuck a few times, and then I mistakenly cancelled the process. I've restarted it now from where it left off, and we'll see how it does.

To clarify: both drives that I am using for the recovery at this moment are NEW. So I'm not terribly concerned about the drives degrading.

What happened was I had a failing 1TB drive. I then imaged this drive onto a 2TB that I had and was using for storage purposes. In the process, I did not realize I was rewriting the file structure of the 2TB drive as well. I was left with an image of the 1TB drive, and inaccessible data from what was already on the 2TB drive. So I bought a new 2TB drive so that I would be able to run photorec between these two NEW drives.

The good news is that photorec is recovering a lot of files successfully. The bad news, of course, is that there's no structure or naming, only extensions.

Since I'm primary interested in photos, videos, and documents, I was thinking of writing a script to find these files, and reorganize them into their own folders. Then I could manually organize them form there. Is there existing software that already exists to do this for me?

GetDataBack could do a better job at the recovery. IMHO a licence is well worth it anyways. The scripting thing has been spoken about before. If you search for renaming files or even scripts, Im sure you will find it. I cant remember specifics right now... but I think the general gist was you would be stuck renaming yourself.. rou couls simply sort by extension in windows and cut n paste files into different filetype folders...

Some post-recovery suggestions ...
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/After_Using_PhotoRec


http://easytag.sourceforge.net/

Here are suggestions for tools that are able to automatically rename certain JPEG file formats:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/After_Us ... toRec#JPEG

You could probably sort your photo files by searching the header information for the camera model/make and date/time stamps. Even the "Find" function in Windows can do this, although not elegantly.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

For what its worth, you did everything right, apart from the obvious where you overlooked, or missed the way the image would write onto the disk. You obviously read up on your issue, and thought about before starting your DR process. It is heartening to see you getting back your files and a testament to how tricky this stuff can be.

well done, bad luck, well done again, in that order

Why not use testdisk from the same supplier as it would recover the files as they were in the same folder with the same names and locations as they were originally placed? Just use the testdisk_win.exe file instead of photorec from withing the same zip file that you downloaded.

It will show up the disk, then go to advance and further to "list and copy" files. It will then list all the files/folders and you can either copy all of it or selectively to another HDD. This way it copies the files in the same sequence as they were placed in the broken HDD. That's what i have done: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28030

OP is probably done now but for Photorec future use:

To speed the process considerably use File Options and uncheck all. ([s] toggles)
then scroll and select, say, jpgs (select using space bar)
[X] jpg

and any other files that are important.
[b] to save and [Quit] to return to previous menu's
Without some sort of filesystem capability, large files (ie video) do not respond well to photorecs file carving as they are usually fragmented. mpg's and some others usually have hundreds of false positives.

concur with others, either use Testdisk or throw a few dollars at R-studio or GetDataBack or Christophe if TDisk/PR worked for you. Well worth the money.
R-Studio will also file carve and can identify and recover camera images (jpeg exif) and mask by filesize to eliminate most of the cr*p left in internet cache directories.

gl

Kern

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