Maximize Recovery

[Tom W]

Hi Alexey,

Thank you very much for this product - it hads probably just saved my friend (and my respect) 350GB worth of data!

The other day in Acronis Disk Director 2011 I copied the MBR of a system partition to that of a copy of that partition on another hard disk, to try and make it system bootable. But I accidentally copied the same MBR to another, non-system partition on the other disk too. To not confuse the BIOS, or further interfere with the MBR, I tried to convert the almost full 400gb non-system partition to logical. However I didn't want to wait as long as it was going to take so I clicked cancel. After an hour of waiting with little to no processing activity, it still hadn't cancelled. I found nothing on Google so I called Acronis and their support directed me to end the task in the task manager, which to my reluctance, I did. The disk then then displayed in Acronis as 'RAW' and 'Not Formatted'. In my computer it wouldn't open and said it was corrupted. I believe this is negligence by Acronis.

Sillily I then spent the next day unsuccessfully trying to get Windows to boot of the first partition on the new disk. In that process Windows Startup Repair, /fixboot, /fixmbr, bootsec repair and chkdisk were run many times in Windows 7 recovery and its CMD. Then yesterday I started to try and recover the corrupt second partition, by trying many options in a myriad of partition recovery programs (like convert to logical, rebuild MBR, change letter, file system code etc.), to no avil. Many reported the partition was fine - and that the filesystem was the problem. It seemed this process further complicated the situation as successive programs reported increasing false partition directories in the table. So I finally decided to stop and trialled 10 of the most prominent corrupt-partition file recovery programs. Zero Assumption Recovery seemed the best, for its relevance to my problem, speed, folder directory structure recovery support, filetype indifference, and apparent thoroughness. It took 2 hours for its default in-depth scan on the partition to complete and found over 39000 files in perfect folder directory structre, reporting 86% as valid. So I purchased it, and it's restoring the data to another drive right now.

But I want to ask, is there anything I can do, like running chkdisk again, that might improve recovery ZAR scanned again? I doubt there would be, but just wanted to check.

Also, the PC has 4GB RAM, 4GB of Virtual Memory, is running on a 320GB Hard Drive, recovering from a 700GB Hard Drive to two 320GB ones, so would it be best to set the disk read and write cache maximums to their maximums of 512MB? I'm wasn't quite was what is meant by 'physical memory' in the Disk cache sizes section of the Runtime control panel, or what the optimum sizes would be for relatively large, fast drives?

Thanks a lot and I'm amazed how one person? can develop a program seemingly better than those of many large multinational corporations worldwide.

Regards,
Tom W