Re: [Thinkpad] Can't copy some files from C: (mounted as USB external elsewhere)

Another update, I searched for some file-finding utilities and downloaded 3. All are paid programs with a free version that tells you what it found and what it thinks it can do with it (one will also restore the very small files for free). I'm running them on the desktop machine with notebook drive mounted as an external (today it's L:).

Specifically, the programs are:

-- File Scavenger
-- PC Inspector File Recovery
-- Win_Undelete

Does anyone have opinions on these? I have no hesitation paying for any of them (they're ~$50) if they work, but of course I'd prefer not to pay for them, and don't want to do use them if they're bad.

First I tried File Scavenger, it has a Quick mode that (I guess) just reads the directory structure. Took about a minute, reported a bunch of stuff found, but it was almost all folders without content, and most of the files it did find were thumbs.db. :( I didn't try the Long method.

Right now I've got PC Inspector File Recovery running. It didn't seem to offer a Quick method, but guided me straight to a cluster-by-cluster search. It started off really fast, reporting that it found a few thousand files and estimating ~250 minutes to complete. It's since slowed down, perhaps reading some bad sectors or something, but it's been stuck at 4544 lost files found for about half an hour. The cluster counter is still changing, but slowly, and "Time left" is up to 1118 minutes (!). Now 1126 minutes. :( I'm hoping this is a temporary setback and that it will pick up speed eventually. At most the progress counter is at maybe 10% (not marked) so this is going to be disastrous if it stays like this. Now 1147 minutes to go.

Thanks for reading, and any comments welcome!

=andrew

>[I hope it's okay to consolidate all the replies into one message. =aw]
>
>Thank you everyone for the replies and suggestions. I've tried some, will try
>the others, but it looks to me like it the problem might actually be a memory
>problem, and the bad HD a symptom (which, yes, is what Bruce predicted ;)).
>
>I copied everything I could from the HD (as N: on this desktop), but Documents
>& Settings shows about 45Gb total and it's short 40Gb of that. :( The
>"Andrew" folder has no "+" beside it. I haven't tried all the utilities that
>were suggested, but if anyone can suggest what would be good specifically for
>this problem, please let me know.
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Received on Sat Jan 20 16:48:07 2007