Speed up Lost and Found file recovery times

[MartyBoy]

I am using PowerQuest's "Lost and Found" on a drive that has had the FAT tables zeroed. It has been running for five days and tells me there are still 7 days remaining to complete! The drive is a 40Gb Seagate Baracuda, but I need access to other drives in the PC (470MHz Celeron with 128Mb RAM)urgently.
Any clues or other products that can reverse engineer the files quicker than this?

 

[kshugart]

Martyboy,
Would like to help, however, can you be more specif as to why you are using the lost & found in the first place.

What happened to the drive?
Is there any noises from the drive?
Does it spin?
What were you doing when the problem occured?

Give us a clue.

Klon Shugart
Data Recovery Specialist
CCNA/MCP2K/CDRT
Microsoft Certified Partners

http://www.adv-data.com

 

[MartyBoy]

Hi kshugart
Well you've forced me to submit to public embarrasement, but I probably deserve it. I was cloning (ghosting?) a drive using Norton Ghost and ghosted the new blank (except for Command.com, IO.sys and recycle bin)drive over what was supposed to have been the source drive. My excuse was tiredness and using another drive of the same brand and type as the source drive... anyway, before I had time to realise what had been done (accepting the old drive label as the new drive label in the final "are you sure" stage), the job was done and I was left wondering why 4.76Gb of data had just been ghosted in two seconds flat.

This was supposed to have been a routine job of upgrading some hardware for one of my clients. No drive problems, just rearranging drives for security and backup purposes. Yes, I do have data backups of critical data, but there were a few items on the source drive that will cause some pain if they are lost (software downloaded from the net.. some of it quite expensive etc.)

The reason for Lost & Found is that all other recovery utilities that I possess couldn't reconstruct the FAT. Most could read the entire disk as unallocated clusters which confirmed the files were still there and I can see them with forensic software, but they couldn't bring them back to life for me. For all I know in about 6.8 days Lost & Found may come to the same conclusion, but at the moment it is telling me it has found 1 partition, 654 directories and 17,504 files. I'm too chicken to pull the plug after 7 days, in case it is telling the truth.

My problem is waiting for it to finish the searching so I can get on with life and use my forensic machine for better purposes. I thought that once it reached the end of populated clusters it might get the hint and speed up, but no, it just chugs away at 85 sectors per second, on and on, day after day....

Anyway, I was just hoping someone knew of a way to speed things up on the fly, like pouring ice over the power supply... anything!

I have tested L & F on another machine and if the search process is halted by going to the main menu and (I had hoped) selecting "thats enuf files thanks" that I could select the already discovered files and copy them to another drive. However L& F just thanked me for using them and waved goodbye all the way to the DOS prompt. No log file, no file table... nothing!

 

[diogenes10]

Martyboy
Wondered if you'd be kind enough to provide an update?
Did lost and found do any good?
Thanks
Diogenes

 

[MartyBoy]

Sorry for delay, gave up on responses and didn't check for a new post.
Update on Lost and Found success in recovering a drives entire contents after being zapped by Norton Ghost is ....a score of 3 out of 10.
After 11 days 19 hours a complete FAT, directory structure and file name image was created. However, most files (about 70%) were corrupted to varying degrees.
The drive had not been defragged for about one month, so files should have been predominantly in sequential clusters, and was only 25% used space showing in drive properties before the zapping.
Thankfully, an out of date but still highly useful good old tape backup and redownload of email retained on the mail server saved my skin. And other vital components.
So the saga is ended with no better solution in sight, apart from yet more backups and eternal vigilance before pressing start buttons.

 

[diogenes10]

martyboy
appreciate post back to let us know.
as you can see, others have had ghost issues too & I'd hoped maybe you'd found a solution.

your conclusion of eternal backup and vigilance was nicely put.