In future, I guess, you will be more interested in having backups. I presume that you are storing any recovered files on separate storage but they might not have their original file names and so the work to sort them out will be huge. If you want to be very safe you need to clone the hard drive first and work on that.īecause of its size of the hard drive and the way that software works, which is that it will find any file fragment and try and rescue it and that rescue will include old deleted files that is going to take days.
If that can't be done because the file system is very corrupted then either the Linux ntfsfix or Windows own chkdsk will restore the file system. Full list of improvements can be found on Follow on Twitter or Facebook. If it were me that was trying to recover the hard drive, I would boot up a Live Linux Distro from a USB stick and with luck I will just be able to read the data and pull off files to another storage to reduce that 96 % to the 80 to 90 % level. For a start you need to check the SMART values and I suspect those will be OK and what you have (most likely) is a jammed up hard drive being 96 % full which Windows doesn't like. Its an excellent software for recovering lost files that one cannot locate or are.
I think you are tackling the problem incorrectly. Disk Drill has an intuitive user interface and it is quite easy to use.