Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Actually, I need more information to understand the situation. What is the file system of the WDC My Book Live? R-Linux can understand only extfs file system used in Linux. But I can guess from your post that you use Windows, so R-Linux is quite useless for that.
And what is your Windows version? XP, 7, 8?

Well, I hit "Reopen Drive Files" last night at 12:08 am. Then, I went to be about 45 minutes later and the estimated time remaining was about 1d14h. Discouraging, but what the heck. Give it all night and see what happens, I thought.

This morning, I come downstairs and the log file shows "Enumeration of files for F: completed" at 1:29 am!!! Wow! Good.

So I try to recover one of the deleted files individually. No dice. What ends up being copied to my laptop is a zero byte file - essentially just the filename.

What am I doing wrong? Any ideas?

I am encountering exactly the same thing. My drive is a 3 TB SATA pulled from a perfectly fine WDC My Book Live. I was foolish enough to press delete on a single video file in a directory which my wife spent hundreds of hours putting together. I didn't know the focus in Windows Explorer was actually in the navigation pane, so rather than delete the selected file, it began to delete the entire directory! I cancelled it before it wiped everything out, but I lost at least 75%.

So I've pulled the drive and hitched it up to an Apricorn SATA/USB interface to my Win7 laptop (wish I had a desktop now with SATA so I wasn't so constrained by slow USB speeds!)

I fired up R-Linux and rather than RTFM, I started a scan.

After an hour, it showed that it had found about 150K files, but that it wouldn't be complete until tomorrow night!!!

After 3 hours, I decided I should maybe do a bit of research on the situation, so I pressed "stop". It didn't. I pressed stop every way possible (menus, right-click, etc.) It wouldn't even let me close the program, saying that the current operation had to complete. I'm not a pushy guy, so I went and had a coffee, did the laundry and came back in an hour. It was still locked down hard, so I used task manager to kill R-Linux off. It did, after some complaining about it becoming non-responsive (I already knew that, Windows, but thanks anyway).

My second kick at the cat locked the whole computer up solid. Not even a nice blue screen. Not even caps-lock/num-lock lights going on/off. Solid. So I gave it 5 seconds on the power key and rebooted. The .scn file was about 300 Mb and when I tried to open it with Notepad, it froze Notepad completely. Another hour later, I killed off Notepad using Task Manager again and deleted the file, figuring it was probably halfway through a write when I rebooted and it was corrupt in some way.

Finally, I decided to limit the R-Linux scan to the first 10 gigs of the drive and it took about 10 minutes, came back nicely, and showed me the directory structure and file names clearly and beautifully! Quite encouraging. The deleted ones, each of them has a little red X through the file icon and is listed as having a size of 0 bytes.

I right clicked on one of the deleted files, now treading very carefully, the prize tantalizingly close now, and selected "recover". It then prompted me to put the recovered file somewhere other than where it actually was.

This concerned me. I was hoping to just leave it in place, physically, and "undelete" it. I don't want to take it off the drive it is currently on right now. Trying to squeezed up to 2 Tb through this crummy little USB connection will be terminally slow and, worse, my wife comes home tomorrow and I'm a dead man if she finds out I nuked all her hard work!! (Sweating bullets - mitigated by eating the kids' hallowe'en candy...)

Anyway, that's where I am right now, and I'm going to go through the manual to see if I'm missing the finer points and the easy solution is actually staring me right in the face. If I do, I'll post what happens. If not, I might post here again in desperation or try some other software product. But I like the look of this one - pretty clean, simple enough user interface and well thought of on the net. I sure don't want to install Ubuntu and re-learn Linux (left that behind in 1996 - loved it, but had to move on with life.) If it's a choice between learn and install Ubuntu or face the wife, you know I'll be looking the download site pretty soon...

Wish me luck!

I recommend you to return to Ubuntu. Linux is better for file recovery.

Thanks. Will give that a try although it is difficult to tell where it gets stuck as it still looks like it is scanning as it still gets an error from a given sector very few seconds it's just that it won't stop but I'll start with a relatively small region and work my way up from there. Worth saying that I have also tried running r-linux within ubuntu as well as windows and still get the same issue so suspect it is disk related.

Most likely, the disk has some hardware problems. I recommend you to notice where R-Linux gets stuck on the disk, create a region from disk's start till the problem area, and scan it saving the scan info. Then recover files from that region.

I'm using R-Linux to recover files off a WD mybook live 2TB hard drive that I have stripped from it's holder and attached via a SATA:USB converter to my windows 7 PC. When I run R-Linux it manages to find plenty of files on the drive but the scan gets stuck, the log begins to only show file errors, the progress box shows that it will take months to complete, the time elapsed count freezes and will not end the scan even when I click stop. The only way out is to pull the USB cable in which case the scan speeds up rapidly and fails through the remaining sectors in 10 minutes, at this point it shows that it has found the folders but when reconnecting the USB it fails to recover them presumably because it has now lost the link to the drive. I think that if I could end the scan using the "stop" button or other method then it should be able to find the files.

Any ideas?