Where is the space going?

[BadPeteNo]

I'm using a program called "get data back from NTFS" to recover data off of a damaged laptop harddrive. The damaged drive is only 160 GB, but about a third of the way through the recovery process it says I've got 40kb free on the 500 GB drive I'm copying everything on to.

When viewing the contents of the 500 GB (WD Scorpio Blue btw), it shows the folder I created to put the data in as being 4.8 GB, and that's the only thing on the drive. I've seen other drives in the past that seemed full but weren't, and while some linux solutions worked in some cases, reformatting ALWAYS worked.

I reformatted the drive and after letting the program run overnight, the same thing happened again. It never seems to make it past the program files. The damaged drive's owner said there's about 40-50 GB of personal data (all in his user folders) and almost nothing installed beyond the OS (vista).

This happened using both XP and 7 on the recovery rig.

Any thoughts?

 

[Jackson147]

You'd better send it to an data recovery company as soon as possible, if the inner data is VERY important.

 

[BadPeteNo]

I am the data recovery company. I charge $20 for my friends. This is the 7th or 8th time I've done this. I've also had good success with the FAT version and iPods that died or got unplugged while syncing.

Needless to say, if the data was several hundred dollars worth of important, I wouldn't be posting this thread.

Since posting, I took the time to specifically remove only the data my client actually wanted (pics, movies, music, incriminating love letters from an ex, the usual) when my attempt to copy the whole filesystem failed.

The problem is the amount of time/supervision required.

First it scans the drive. This takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 hours depending on size, data, and the extent of the damage. If I close the program after this point, I have to start over, so I have a frankenbox under my desk doing the work. When it's done, I have a rebuilt file tree including deleted files, crap that was formatted over, old deleted temp files, etc. It takes about 3 or for 'supervisory clicks' along the way, and after about 20 minutes or so, I can usually guess how long before I need to check back and click.

After that, you simply copy over what you want on to a health drive. In every case up until now, I copied the whole filesystem. The shortest time was an hour for a 500GB drive with about 40GB used that was later fixed completely by simply using chkdsk. The longest was an 80GB drive that was mostly full. It took about 6 days, and about 10% of the files were effed up. It also took about 3 attempts over a month because of bad desk layout and a cat that likes cords and not using a dedicated rig.

Side note, that client was broke and took 4 months to show up with a new drive (I was also sitting on data from his external that got dropped at the same time, so about 200GB total). I though that I'd lost the data while I was migrating to some new equipment so I tried again and the drive died entirely in the process. Luckily, I had only misplaced it.

The point is, the less time I waste spinning a damaged drive chasing dead ends, the better.

GetdatabackforNTFS seems to think that some of the folders like appdata are as much as 1.5TB, which is physically impossible. Trying to copy these folders results in the healthy drive filling up with endless subfolders, like it's getting stuck in a loop of shortcuts. Once it fills the 500GB drive, it stalls out and gives disk space error messages.

My workaround was only copying the folders I wanted one at a time. None of the user-created personal folders showed the wrong sizes, only system folders. It shows the filesystem as almost 3TB on a 160GB drive (top that winzip!).

The problem with this method is that I have to baby sit it, and I risk accidentally skipping over a folder when I walk away for an hour or two. Meanwhile, it may have finished that folder after 20 minutes and that drive is just spinning away, and it can't really work while I'm sleeping.

I haven't tried telling windows to power down the drive when not in use, though I think it could help some.

Anyone have any experience with this sort of issue? Also, can I edit the name of this thread to better reflect my questions (such as 160gb drive shows 3tb of data in recovery software)?