Confirmation of Settings for Recovery

[Dwight Wilson]

After reformatting my internal computer hard drive and reinstalling Linux, I discovered my backup drive (USB, external) appears to have also been formatted. The drive is currently showing as empty and doesn't appear to have any partitions on it (no auto-mounting in Windows XP or Linux).

I downloaded ZAR 9.1 Build 4 and it says it can recover a 98% of the files, but not all including some of the files I need. Admittedly, I am considering sending the drive to a recovery service to see if they can do any better (they do cost a lot more!). However, before doing that I would like to give ZAR another chance and purchase the software if the results are good.

My questions are:

- The Quick Scan was used since I did not know to disable it. Should I assume it will do a better job of recovery with this disabled? If so, how much? It said it could do 98% previously.

- As an extension of the above question, the default settings were used for everything, so is it reasonable to assume non-default settings, including disabling the "Quick Scan", will greatly improve ZAR's ability to get that last 2% back?

- In researching past posts, I see that another ZAR customer was assisted with providing the correct sector offset to improve the recovery. If that something I can ascertain from the logs (IE. does the software write something into the log to suggest that) or something I would need to get from ZAR tech support (IE. the forum here)?

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/data-rec...ght=Basic+Scan

- In reviewing the list of files, I see the normal "PASS" and "FAIL", but also see a lot of "UNKN". Should I assume that means the software could not determine what the file is or the actual state of it? As noted above, ZAR said 98% is recoverable, but there are a lot of UNKN in the file list. Also, please confirm ZAR will try to recover ever file, whether it said FAIL or not, so I can manually test them once they are recovered.

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/data-rec...ight=PASS+FAIL

Thanks.

Dwight

[Alexey V. Gubin]

1. If you got 95+ percent correct, resetting Quick Scan is not going to improve the result.

2. The default settings are good unless the damage has some specifics to it. In your case, deviating from the default settings does not look worthwhile.

3. Correct sector offset and similar tricks are useful if you get 15% valid files or so. If you got 95+, these parameters are already correct.

4. For some files we can determine validity. Like, ZIP archives, which have well defined structure. For other files, we cannot determine the validity, or there is no good structure (like RAW camera images). So the validator logs UNKN, means "I've seen the file but cannot make out if it is good or bad".

5. ZAR will copy every file regardless of PASS/FAIL status.

[Dwight Wilson]

Originally Posted by Alexey V. Gubin

1. If you got 95+ percent correct, resetting Quick Scan is not going to improve the result.

2. The default settings are good unless the damage has some specifics to it. In your case, deviating from the default settings does not look worthwhile.

3. Correct sector offset and similar tricks are useful if you get 15% valid files or so. If you got 95+, these parameters are already correct.

4. For some files we can determine validity. Like, ZIP archives, which have well defined structure. For other files, we cannot determine the validity, or there is no good structure (like RAW camera images). So the validator logs UNKN, means "I've seen the file but cannot make out if it is good or bad".

5. ZAR will copy every file regardless of PASS/FAIL status.

Thanks for the quick response and have a nice day.

Dwight