How Frustrating.

[rwoelich]

Long story short...

I have an internal hard drive that was installed in an XP machine which I later tried to put into an external enclosure so I could transfer some files to a different computer without having to do it over the network and wait forever and a day. Well, as soon as I put it in the external enclosure, it no longer worked properly.

It's NTFS, connected to a Vista computer with the external USB enclosure, and it shows up in My Computer but as "Access Denied" as the drive name or whenever you try to access the drive. I'm familiar with taking ownership, but the Security tab doesn't even appear in the drive properties so I can't... I can take ownership of anything on any other drive, but not this drive. In Disk Management, it sees a healthy active NTFS partition on the drive.

The funny part: I downloaded the trial of ZAR and it saw all of the files, intact, so I was happy. I had wayyy too many folders than to live with the 4 folder limit, so I tested to make sure the files would copy and were intact and after verifying they were I purchased the full version. In between I uninstalled and reinstalled ZAR. I didn't save the scan from the first time, so I rescanned the drive and now all the files can be seen but they won't recover properly. 0% of files read as valid.

When I had the trial and copied the few folders to test, it worked fine, and then I turned off and disconnected the drive. I didn't reconnect it until I reinstalled the full version of ZAR, so nothing should have changed on it unless it's a physical failure. I just don't know why the files would recover with the trial but not with the full version.

Help? :p It would also be acceptable to find a way to get into the Security tab and take ownership or reset the permissions, because I don't believe anything happened to damage the actual files, but I guess I don't know that for sure. Thanks...

[rwoelich]

Never mind, resolved my problem. I had to go through the trouble of pieceing together another computer from old parts, installing XP, and then connecting the hard drive, taking ownership, and adding Everyone to have full control over all files. When I connected the hard drive to the Vista computer again, all is well. It's just weird that ZAR would recover the files the first time, but not after I buy the full version... hmm.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

This sometimes happens if you have something subtly different in settings?

Or if the recovered sample just happens to be correct, and the rest is not?

Or sometimes if there is a small number of files on a volume, or if virtual disk images are involved, we know results can oscillate (i.e. you just get different results between passes). In this case one more run typically resolves the problem.

Regardless of which of the above was the cause, you get your refund.

[rwoelich]

Wow, that's cool... I wasn't expecting or asking for a refund :) but I do appreciate it.

It's really unusual, though. Now that I have ownership and permissions to copy the files off the drive I'm doing so and they're all intact when I move them using Windows (simple "Move to Folder"), but ZAR reported that 0% of the files were intact during two seperate passes before I got the permissions straightened out. I assume ZAR doesn't care about permissions, but I still find it strange that the trial version could recover files in two different runs and the full version couldn't in two different runs.

Maybe once I have everything copied over, I'll try it again. Theoretically ZAR should be able to "recover" files on a drive that has no problems, right? i.e. I can now get the data off my hard drive through Windows, so there's no reason that ZAR should report those files as corrupt because they're definitely not.

Thanks again for sending the refund. I will likely have use for ZAR again in the future and will definitely repurchase it then. :)

[Alexey V. Gubin]

If there is nothing "special" about the volume, and Windows sees the volume is OK, then ZAR should be able to pick up the data.

"Special" cases include

The volume which was just formatted and has a new data written over it. In which case ZAR may go for an "older" files from the "older" volume. In which case you get either "old" files with the admixture of a "new" files, and all new files are broken, or you get it other way round, or you get two sets of files. Whichever way it would work out, you get a mess.
If there are virtual disk images on a volume. You can then get a mix of regular files plus damaged files from within the virtual volumes; or if you request virtual volume suppression, things may easily become even more interesting.However, if you still have ZAR installation, I'd ask you to find a log file,
C:\Program Files\ZAR\logfile.txt, ZIP it and email to me at development@z-a-recovery.com. With this data we can try to identify the issue.