The hard drive is a 540gb partition on a 560gb drive with a rather pathetic spin speed of 5400rpm (SATAII). A few days ago the drive wouldn't boot. After spending ages trying to get into the drive, I used chkdsk on the system partition. The result of this seems to have been the deletion of the file table or something, because the drive behaves as if all the contents have been deleted. with a quick scan, I pretty much get no results.
The problem: It will run, reasonably quickly, till it has found 136107 files. Then it will stop there, while the estimated time remaining increases every so often; it is currently at 11 days. The current progress states 0%. I have been running the program for about 2 hours now and it shows every indication of being stuck in some sort of infinite loop. I cancelled it earlier and it retrieved a number of files that were of no use; windows folder, program files, etc. This is my third time running it and it seems to get stuck in the same place each time.
I am running the software with high process priority. It is configured to recover the file system, deep scan, and to look for deleted files (although I am not entirely sure what the problem with the drive was). I have run chkdsk on the drive and everything was fine, so I cancelled chkdisk about 50% of the way through checking the empty space.
I'm running the software from a new Intel SSD with a clean install of Windows 7 Pro. There are no anti-virus programs running and the secondary drive (the one I am trying to recover files on) is not being used for any other purpose. The windows resource monitor shows that the drive in question has 100% utilisation.
Is this normal? Should I leave it on, or is it (as I suspect) silently failing somewhere?
Thanks,
-Dave
