Lost Partition

[OzRon]

Piriform's website claims that Recuva "can recover files from damaged or newly formatted drives" and states that "Recuva scans all parts of a drive...".
 
Am I misunderstanding? Or am I victim of a documentation problem? Or both?
 
Scenario: Four volumes (C: through F:). Then a crash, and drive D: disappears! When looking at Windows' Disk Management I now see healthy drives C:, E: and F: but the remainder of the drive now shows as "Unallocated".
 
So I obtain and launch Recuva, in the hope of recovering files that were on the now-phantom drive D:. First problem: Before scanning, I have to select what to scan. But while C:, E: and F: are included as options, "Unallocated" is not. Perhaps I have to select "All local disks"? No, that appears to scan only C:, E: and F:.
 
Then I browse through online help and discover that to recover non-deleted files (damaged, etc. drives) I have to select option "Scan for non-deleted files".
 
OK, that makes sense but a subsequent scan of "All local disks" with "Scan for non-deleted files" selected returns thousands of existing files from, you guessed it, C:, E: and F: only!
 
So I'm left to guess that either (1) the crash damage was so great that all traces of files on D: have disappeared or (2) Recuva can only scan areas that are currently allocated a drive letter (and not "all parts of a drive", though that's perhaps a confusing or ambiguous Piriform statement).
 
The answer to this may be that I have to FIRST re-assign "D" to the Unallocated space, which I haven't yet tried while not wanting to do anything that may affect the space that needs to be scanned for files. But if that IS the answer, clearer program documentation would be a great help.
 
Comments/answers appreciated.
 

[hazelnut]

 

Recuva can only scan areas that are currently allocated a drive letter

 

This.

[OzRon]

Thank you, hazelnut. I suspected as much.
 
Perhaps someone at Piriform might consider clarifying the documentation by adding wording along the lines of the bolded parts below? It could save others a ton of time.
 
- "can recover files from damaged ... drives provided that Windows still sees the original drive letter assignment", and
 
- "Recuva scans all parts of a drive ... provided the drive has a drive letter assigned to it".
 
PS - I re-assigned "D:" to my lost drive by getting Windows to create a new volume in the space that had become mysteriously "Unallocated". Windows insisted that I needed to format the volume before use, which I did using "Quick format" in an attempt to leave the data space intact. Then ran Recuva and scanned D: (including "non-deleted files"). It didn't find a single one of my many lost files!
 
I would hope that this was a result of the original crash/damage, and not a result of my re-assigning that Unallocated space. However if it was the latter, I would argue that Recuva helped lose my precious data. (And I wouldn't use it again until it adds the capability to scan "all parts of a drive", as advertised.)
 

[Augeas]

I guess it's to do with the interchangeable use of the terms disk, drive, volume and partition, for which I know I'm as guilty as anyone else in this thread. It could, and perhaps should, be argued that Recuva scans all parts of a partition, and recovers from damaged partitions. Unallocated space, no matter what it contained before, isn't a partition any more. Recover doesn't scan all parts of a drive, it scans partitions. Yes, Piriform's documentation could be better, it's not their finest achievement.

[OzRon]

Thank you Augeas. Agreement appreciated.

 

Probably wrong place to mention this, but for the first time ever I tried to click on "Like this" (on your post). The result, a message stating:

An error occurred

You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day

 

That suggests that I am allowed zero positive votes per day!

 

Also when initially I pasted an actual screenshot of the above message into this post, it appeared fine in the "Reply to this topic" window. But when I later clicked on "Post" I got:

An error occurred

You are not allowed to use that image extension on this community

Huh?

 

I think that this forum software is not their finest achievment either.

[Augeas]

I don't think that's ever worked. I don't think that anyone has complained about not being able to like me before.

[hazelnut]

The 'like' button has never been enabled.

 

It was found that this could be open to abuse.

 

But we still like Augeas

[trium]

hello ozron 

 

perhaps helps this for you about to take a screenshot insert in a post...
 
how to do screen capture and use image hosting sites

problems uploading attachments

[OzRon]

Thank you trium.
 
I appreciate your suggestions, and that you addressed the second part of my last post. However Windows' native "Snipping Tool" easily creates screenshot images for me. And the image (error message) was so small that it was hardly worth using a separate image hosting site. Plus, I was hoping to have the error message appear "inline" in the post, so I wasn't trying to include it in a separate uploadable attachment. Perhaps on this forum pasting is not allowed and one has to resort to separate attachments, but I found it strange that the small pasted image was accepted until I tried to Post it, when I then received the second error that didn't tell me that I am not allowed to paste a small image, but that I'm not allowed to use that "extension". IMHO that's as unclear and ambiguous as the original problem I reported at the start of this thread.
 

[Christian95]

Hello,

I in had too the problem of DD lost, not recognized by Windows, Linux.

 

I used "Ultimat Boot Cd" to redo the partition, then " Formatting NTFS ".

 

Now I see my files with Recuva, but when I want to get back them, I have this message " Peripheral not loan ".

See the Comment of 15/10/2015

 

Sorry for my English, it is an on-line translator who makes it