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!
