Should I throw in the towel?

It has been a while, since finding this sight years ago, I learned a lot, what to do and what not to do, the most important part. I have had few problems I have not been able to fix, due to what I have learned here. Now, I am deep shite!

Dell Optiplex, 2.1 G 4 meg Ram
windows 7

WD My Book 2Tb

I had most of that 2tb full with music, movies and album art. I had about 200gs left and did a defrag and installed a few things, the drive took a dump, raw, not in mycomputer but in disc management. Boot live linux, no drive, used Hiren's disc for viruses, the system would hang up not letting you go into disc management, and other things related to the drive. It felt like a virus on two machines. Fresh installs, working, but the drive was still gone.
mangled corrupted drive. I have tried Stellar Pheonix, O&O iskrecovery, no luck, the last I saw of O&O it said it would take 95 days to complete.

A friend suggested recover my Files, Nice Gui, it has found 38,000 files after 23 hours and is stuck around 10% for an hour the block count did not move, now it just started again.

My question, do I just let it run for 10 or 15 days, or should it have found the file structure by now, oh I forgot to say it is in stage 4 of 5. Boy this has been a long 2 weeks of trying to recover this drive. The disc has not been formatted, or anything done to it. If I should just be patient, let me know, it will be worth it in the end? Thanks guys (and girls)

 

15 days is a long time I would deduce the program cannot continue due to the failing hard drive or extremly corrupted files, I don't think I've ran a drive longer than a day or so but the drives were never full or 2TB.

I would try a different program, here's a post I made a while back regarding basic data recovery, plus a few tips sorting through the files once recovered as this is the biggest task.

Download and run the drives manufacturers diagnostic software to fully check the health of the drive, if the health is really bad no scan may run at all,if the health isn't too bad run check disk and let it recover bad sectors then run the scans again.

Be aware you'll need a large fast drive to copy the recovered files to.

 

@Rikki - you need to edit your canned text - the first two links are broken - not in proper bbcode format.

@Dorian - It sounds like the drive is toast. And sadly, the more a failing or corrupt drive is used, the greater the corruption often becomes and the less successful recovery is likely be.

If me, I would install that drive as a secondary drive (NOT boot drive) into a computer (not enclosure) or via eSATA connection then attempt recovery with Recuva from the makers of CCleaner.

However, I would not expect much success, based on the problem's rather severe description.

Days and days is not a good sign. Typically it takes seconds to recover a file because all that is need is to update the file tables. Remember, when you delete a file, all that happens is the file tables are changed to show that file's storage location is now available for new data.

For deleted files that have been overwritten (or partially overwritten) the recovery program will try to piece the remaining segments, but it should not take days - that suggests to me greater damage to the drive itself.

So to that, I agree with Rikki to run the drive maker's own diagnostics program on the drive. You can find the proper diagnostics here: Hard Drive Diagnostics - listed by maker.

 

Thanks guys, I was kinda thinking that, but wanted to hear something different. It took this to get me to get another 2tb hardrive, I had most of my music, documents and apps backed up, Losing 15 years of high quality album art and tons of audio samples. Looks like I am going to have 4tb of extra room soon. It did pick up 5 thousand more .wav's over night.

I will let it go all day today and see. Rikky I would be glad to look at those pages, I just checked they are both a no go. Digerati thanks , I knew something was not right. I re-format and check then, it should go ten times faster then. Live and learn, live and learn.

 

I highlighted and did a Google search and all links worked.

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/pc_tools_file_recover.html

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/wise_data_recovery.html

Recuva that digerati posted is good also, pctools file recover is my favourite.