iUndelete closes without undeleting

[hari]

Hi,

 I accidentally deleted a large amount of data from my external hard drive. iUndelete trial version showed all the deleted files. So purchased the license.
 
 After the scan, On the right side of the application window, I selected all the folders to undelete and clicked on Apply and then iUndelete program disappears. I looked in my destination folder and only 1 file was undeleted. I repeated this process by scanning again and same thing happened.
  iUndelete is installed in a Win 2000 Pro machine and my external hard-drive (containing data to be undeleted) was connected to it.

Please help !!

[Joep]

Hello,

I have never seen that behavior before. What if you instead of selecting all directories, limit the number of directories somewhat, and then click 'recover selected'?

Are you using the version you downloaded after purchasing: so below webaddresses it should say the version number and 'registered'.

[hari]

Hi Joep,

I uninstalled the trial version and then installed the licensed version. I am sure I am using the licensed version since it undeleted one file. I have so far tried almost 10 times. It is not even undeleting a couple of files at a time.
iUndelete program just disappears.

[Tom]

It sounds like the program is ended before running to completion, probably an incompatibility or windows issue. Have you checked the windows error logs? They might tell you a bit more. It's not something we can reproduce here.
Do you have many programs running in the background? Things like anti-virus apps may interfere, you could try disabling as many running apps as possible and try again. Another trick may be to run windows in safe mode and see if you can complete the action then. If that works then you know for sure that something is interfering.

[hari]

I moved to another Windows machine (Win XP Pro) - still facing same issue
no other programs running in the background
logs - are these the ones we see under eventvwr ?
I will try to run windows in safe mode and try again.

[Tom]

I moved to another Windows machine (Win XP Pro) - still facing same issue

That's weird...

logs - are these the ones we see under eventvwr ?

Yes

[Joep]

Hello,

I am not convinced it is a Windows issue, it may some 'weird' file system issues we simply haven't run into yet, or they may be a huge number if deleted files that simply causes iUndelete to run out of memory (the more deleted files, the more memory it requires). What was the drive containing the deleted files formatted with?

It is important that you recover those files as quickly as possible or else they may become unrecoverable, so I have sent you a key for iRecover in a personal message.

In the recovery type selection screen, select 'simple volume recovery ...' and 'only recover files normally deleted..'.

[hari]

yes, there are a huge number of deleted files. But I have been selecting only a few files (3 to 4) at a time to "Recover Selected"
 What is the total deleted data size that iUndelete can successfully recover before running out of memory ?
 (on a machine with Win 2000 Pro with 2GB RAM)

 I think the external hard drive from which I am trying to undelete was NTFS formatatted.
 
 Received your email with the key for iRecover. Thanks for sending this. I will try it right now and let you know how it goes.

BTW, had the same issues with iUndelete when used in Windows SAFE mode (XP pro)

[Joep]

Hello,

I am not sure, never reached the limits while testing upto 10000s of files. On the other hand it may be some MFT record issue that 'freaks' iUndelete out. iUndelete assumes the file system to be intact, so it's handling of weird or illegal data inside MFT entries isn't as advanced as in iRecover where we actually expect all kinds of illegal entries.

[hari]

Joep,

Tried using iRecover today. It was able to retrieve all the folders I selected for recovery but all the recovered files in those folders were unreadable (text files had unreadable data and PDFs will not open). Data that I am trying to recover had both encrypted as well as unencrypted files. The content in both types of files when recovered with iRecover were unreadable.
Went back to iUndelete, it is still undeleting one file at a time, but the contents of recovered files are readable.
Any other suggestions that I can try? Anything I can do about the MFT record issue?
iRecover recognized the drive I am trying to recover from as NTFS formatted.

[Tom]

Weird, iRecover not doing it right...
The MFT issue was an educated guess, we don't know that for sure, as likely as it may be. Anyway, the MFT can not be repaired; the common way to deal with MFT damage is to copy the files from the volume with a tool like iRecover.
I have no idea where to look for the source of this problem, but it's likely to be the problem disk: the problem occurs on more machines but always with the same disk. If iRecover doesn't get it right, this will become tricky indeed. You could try to run iRecover with the 'recover both current and deleted files' option, but to be honest I'm not expecting much from that. And if it works you'll have to search through the files to get the deleted files. But worth a try I guess, if only to see if that actually does produce valid files.

Please send us the iRecover log file for the action you performed earlier. Do that first before you start any more runs, I'd like to see the log as it was saved after the recovery of the deleted files. Make sure to ZIP it first, these files can be quite large.

[Tom]

The main thing that jumps out when viewing the log is that there are many many read errors, so the disk is in a bad state. Normal procedure for bad disks is cloning, then followed by file recovery from the cloned disk (if the clone wasn't 100%, which is to be expected when the source disk is going bad). This may very well explain why iUndelete didn't run to completion.

So you have two options at the moment:
- clone the disk and start recovery on the clone
- start recovery (using iRecover) on the bad disk directly. iRecover can deal with read errors, but it's generally not wise to work on a dying disk; cloning first would be the wise thing to do

[hari]

Thank You , I will try my luck with cloning.

iRecover is not an option since the files recovered by it are unreadable.
Even though iUndelete is recovering one file at a time, the files undeleted by it are readable.

[Joep]

Hello,

But since this is not the way iUndelete is designed to work, please email or sent me your me your order ID in a personal message so I can refund. Even the free version allows you to undelete one file at the time.

[hari]

thank you!