Then I could manually organize them form there.If you find yourself here reading this article, it probably means something has gone terribly wrong. 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. The bad news, of course, is that there's no structure or naming, only extensions. The good news is that photorec is recovering a lot of files successfully. So I bought a new 2TB drive so that I would be able to run photorec between these two NEW drives. I was left with an image of the 1TB drive, and inaccessible data from what was already on the 2TB drive. In the process, I did not realize I was rewriting the file structure of the 2TB drive as well. I then imaged this drive onto a 2TB that I had and was using for storage purposes. What happened was I had a failing 1TB drive. So I'm not terribly concerned about the drives degrading. To clarify: both drives that I am using for the recovery at this moment are NEW. I've restarted it now from where it left off, and we'll see how it does. It got stuck a few times, and then I mistakenly cancelled the process.

It ran for a little over a day and I've recovered about 615GB of data so far. So after posting this, photorec did eventually continue on to more sectors. A google search provided some hope that PhotoRec will get out of this cycle on its own. I could really use some help here and would be happy to provide more details. It has also been stuck at 4471 files found - and that value hasn't changed at all. 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. Presently there is an estimated completion time of 242 hours, and it has only been running for 23 minutes.

However, the longer program runs, the longer the estimated completion time becomes. 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). Both the source drive and target drive are new, good drives. 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.

Using photorec