The scanning stopped - then, nothing.

[jugular]

Dear Alexey:

I purchased ZAR 8.3 last night. I suppose I should have run an evaluation first.

As a backdrop: my FAT32 Iomega external firewire/USB drive was working fine. I trusted the internal "stop device" feature of Windows, instead of turning off the drive, before hooking it up to another computer. It was a terrible mistake. The drive and its contents were recognized for some seconds, halted, and the message came that the drive was not formatted and would I like to format it. Two other comps gave the same message, so the "unformatted" status is confirmed.

In other words, this does not appear to be a defective drive, but a drive where the information was simply wiped out. The Iomega forum adviser said cases like these have a greater chance of having data retrieved by binary do-it-yourself recovery software.

ZAR curiously recognized the drive as fixed, and not external. There were also two choices to select from, one that identified the drive capacity (153 g for a 160 drive), and the other giving a series of letters. (I chose the former.) ZAR performed the partition stage of the scan, and then moved on to the drive sectors. The scan was completed. (Half is white, much is black, some green, no red.) The top bar reads that the Volume analysis is still in progress and the elapsed time is still ticking. I had read your "Sticky" that I should expect an analysis time of around two hours for a drive of my capacity, but another part of the instructions stated things could take a long time. So I let it keep running, and the process has been going on for ten (10) hours.

I read your other Sticky messages that identified my problem now, "What to check if system locks up when running ZAR," and "ZAR hangs after completing scan." Most customers reported that ZAR progressed to showing recovered files, but I didn't reach that stage.

As for the things you asked for that might aid with a solution, the logfile in the ZAR directory is timed from the beginning of the scan process, or before. (It reads:
"NT 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1; 3964 MB RAM
TS: Stop validation
TS: Stopped validation
Logging - shut down")

As far as the other tips, the drive is not hot to the touch. I am performing this on a brand new and powerful "Vista" computer, and I have plenty of memory. You also suggested trying the process on another computer, but I have a feeling that is not going to yield a different result (my other computer is ten years old, and the memory, for one thing, will be worse).

Perhaps my now "unformatted" drive provides a worse situation for data recovery than a drive that has typically gone bad? I hope you will have suggestions for me.

Thank you.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Abort it now.

1. What is the build number indicated on a first screen when you launch ZAR?
2. I did not quite understood, is the external drive size actually 160GB? I.e. are you sure you are processing the correct drive?
3. Restart everything (cold reboot), then run ZAR, click "Advanced Configuration" on a first screen, then under "General" change "Normal logging" to "Extended logging".
4. Retry scan
5. See what the log file contains.

[jugular]

Dear Alexey:

Thank you for replying; it was very nice to hear from you.

The build number is 36. And I apologize for not making clearer the capacity for my drive, it is indeed 160 GB. I think it shows up as 153 GB because drives have that frustrating way of not offering their full capacity.

I also wanted to clarify what came across as confusing: when ZAR identifies the drives, and after I selected the "153 GB" one, two options are listed. The first is ID (01010000) Filesystem type (FAT32) Offset [0 MB) Size (153MB) Origin (MBR/Primary). The second is ID (FFFFFFFF) Filesystem type (Define volume manually). I picked the first one, but this step threw me for a loop, a bit.

At any rate, I followed your advice, and changed "Normal logging" to "Extended logging." This time, the colored dots came into view almost immediately, in the same formation as the first time, when it had taken a while for the dots to appear during the scan. (As if they were somehow locked in memory.) The scans took over two hours, and then came to a halt. While I was sure the program froze again (eventually, I could not exit normally and needed "Task Manager"), I let ZAR run for seven hours, since the computer was on anyway.

This time a huge logfile was produced, which I shouldn't reproduce here. I'd be happy to e-mail it to you, if you'd like to contact me through the e-mail address in my account, if you think the information would be useful. It seems the program successfully identified the files on the drive, it just won't allow me to access them, or any directory root.

I'd like to add a heart-to-heart comment, here. The two things that persuaded me to buy ZAR, before running the evaluation I wish I had run now, is that ZAR has been around for perhaps ten years, and I figured the wrinkles from it would have been ironed out by now. In addition, I liked your voice in the forum replies. You seem like a nice and caring person.

I was getting slightly anxious, and wanted to see whether the files in my drive were retrievable, and I tried a product of one of your competitors (from India). Maybe you'll find value from my experience, but here was the contrast: much as all the technical details (which were impressively and comprehensibly written, even lovingly) are valuable from your help files, especially to computer experts, I think most people are like me, and want to get down to business in "zombie" fashion. (It took some work to read the ZAR help section beforehand, to make sure I knew what I was doing at least to some extent; even though I'm not totally stupid when it comes to computers, a good chunk of the instructions did go over my head.)

The Indian software interface, by contrast, was really friendly. All I did was click twice or so, without reading anything, and the software started to immediately scan (taking around two hours), and what I liked was the fact that the folders were getting counted along the way. (In contrast to the ZAR message at the point where the software hangs, "0" files and "0" folders identified, or to that effect.) After the process finished, boom -- there was the data, mostly intact, sitting and waiting for me. (This was the evaluation copy, and I still don't have access to my data, of course. But it was great to learn that the data is there, and recoverable.)

Just to pass on the thought: perhaps you might consider a slight overhaul, making ZAR somewhat more user-friendly to those of us who are less computer-oriented.

At any rate, I anxiously await if you have any more suggestions as to how I can use ZAR to retrieve the data that I know is there. "Spaseeba"!

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Considering you have confirmed success with competition, I think we should give you a refund rather than continue wasting your time debugging. However, I was unable to locate your order given the info available on a forum. Could you please send me a private message with your order number so we can arrange for the refund.