VOLUME ANALYSIS TIME ESTIMATE

[BKCONSULTING]

I am attempting to recover JPEG image files from a 1G memory card. I am able to view the file list in explorer; but, was only able to copy to my HD about half of them...thus, bringing me to your site and ZAR. During the 1st run, the Volume Analysis had been running over 6hrs and only progressed 3% so I ended it, thinking it was searching my 160G usb drive. I disconnected the 160G drive and started the ZAR again. This time, after 3hrs there was no change in any of the statistics: CPU 0%; 0.0 mb/sec; 0.0 seek/sec; located 0 files in 0 directories; RAW SCAN: Identifying files (2%) after 3hrs. Now I cancelled the ZAR, rebooted and am getting the same results. How long should this take? Am I being too impatient? I am running it on a Toshiba Satellite, Intel T2300 CPU, 1.66GHz, with 2G of RAM. I have disabled background programs to commit charge 323m/3412m and 3% CPU usage. The pics are very important to us since they are of a rim to rim Grand Canyon hike with family that will never be repeated. Thanks for your assistance.

Forgot to tell you that I have the card in a built-in card reader on my laptop.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Kill it, restart, proceed up to the point when it asks for a physical device, then right click the card, select "Create image file". Enter a file name somewhere on your hard disk (you need 1GB free space - check). It will try to create a sector-by-sector copy of a card. See if this works fast enough to produce an image in a practical time.

Before you try to create the image file, restart ZAR again with the same settings as earlier, let it run for a couple of minutes. Then check what color is the top-left element of the volume map (colored squares, top of window).
Red color indicates a physically bad card. If it turns out red, adjust settings as described here - http://www.z-a-recovery.com/man-runtime-control.htm (refer to "Recommened Settings.. for a disk with bad sectors") and check if you can get any speed boost with these.

[BKCONSULTING]

Well, maybe that method is not the answer either. The imaging has been running for 16 hrs and progress indicates 5.7% complete. The first couple of boxes on the volume analysis were green. Would it help if I delete the pics I am able to open?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Nope. For some reson, the device is slow to read. If it was on the USB 1.1 bus, I'd say that to be expected. However, with a built-in reader I do not think it is the case. Something unusual must be in drivers, so our disk access library chokes and slows down, or like that.

1. Deleting the files won't help.
2. I'd say that it may work faster if you try a different card reader (if you have one, may be on some other system, or maybe borrow an USB-based one from someone), or a different machine altougether.
3. Also make sure that any resident (on-access) antivirus scanner is disabled. For example, Grisoft's AVG would attempt to scan an entire card/disk once ZAR opens it, resulting in huge slowdowns.