Recovering Partitions & Complete Drives/Disks

The first tab of the software is the disk and partition recovery module. Most people use this module when you have an entire disk, partition or formatted drive that needs to be recovered. This is a general purpose recovery module that covers most items. The other tabs are more specific types of recoveries.

In this screen you will see a list of available disks to recover from. You can also continue a previous recovery. Your hard drives will likely be represented differently than the ones in this list. You will also see what types of drives they are, the size and their partition type. If the drive IS NOT listed here, then be sure you have it connected properly. If it still isn't showing, then Total Recall can't recover that volume. You may need to send in your drive for Full Service In-Lab Recovery.

Select a volume/drive from the list and click "Continue"

Now 01Recoveryl will scan your volume. The estimated time will vary depending on the size and type of media. If the progress bar is not moving, and/or the time just keeps going up, there is likely something wrong with your media. You should cancel the recovery and seek professional in-lab service. See our website for more details.

A typical 120GB hard drive may take between 20 and 45 minutes to scan depending on how full and other factors. If it's taking hours, something is wrong. We recommend a professional. Don't risk doing more damage to your disk or you can easily make your data unrecoverable.

If you stop the recovery part of the way through, you can continue with the data found so far or stop and go back to the main menu. Stopping part way through can get you poor results and fragmented data. We don't recommend doing so unless it's your only option.

The ones in green are the recommended partitions. Each partition has a weight value. If you accidentally ghosted a drive, formatted a disk, or did a "clean install" of your operating system over the top of your data, then the first partition is probably NOT what you are looking for. You can select multiple partitions at a time if you want to see all the data from each, but you may get several different versions of files.

Now you should see a familiar list of files and folders. You can double click on photos and also text files to see the contents. Place a check mark next to each file you wish to recover.