Undelete utilities don't work on C:

I have recently downloaded and tried a couple of undelete programs including the free Pandora Recovery (which PC World tested and found alright) and Undelete Plus. They all work on my F: drive which I use just for backing up files. None will scan my C: drive for deleted files, either crashing, finding nothing, or running continually.

I wonder if there is something wrong with my drive. I ran DskChk and it doesn't find any problems. I have avast! antispyware running but I stopped its "On Access Protection" when running the Undelete programs although none warned about antivirus programs being a problem. I had had Norton Systemworks installed along with its Norton Recycle Bin but uninstalled that a month ago. The uninstall left some bad directory entries in \Recycler\Norton which I had to delete with the "Unlocker" program before I could delete the \Recycler\Norton directory.

Is there another way I can verify that the directory structure etc of my C: drive is really OK? Any other suggestions would also be greatly appreciated.

Old Dude

BTW I am not actually trying to get back a lost file at this time, just preparing for the future.

 

No I do not think there is anything wrong with the C: drive since it is more than likely locked or something of that order pertaining to the undelete programs. One problem with undelete programs is that when you install them they might over write the files you are trying to recover. I have found that if you install the undelete program on another computer and take the hard drive from the one you want to recover programs from and install in the other computer then the undelete program should have less difficulty finding the files and recovering them.

 

Thanks for the encouragement. I jumped to the worst case senario that there is something fundamentally wrong with the drive which seems unlikely since it's my system drive and my system works fine.

I am not worried about overwriting a deleted file since I haven't lost any at this time. You give me an interesting thought though. I think I'll install the program on F: and see if I can access C: from there.

 

If you install on drive F:\ part of it will still install on C:\ drive. If you have not lost anything yet this is a good plan because once installed then it should find anything you have lost since the install and since it was installed previous to loosing files they can not get over written. Go for it.

 

Well, that didn't work. I installed Pandora Recovery on F: and it works fine on F: but not C:. Then today I got email from Pandora saying their program has a problem if the MFT is fragmented which mine is and they will have a fix by the end of the week. In the meantime I will research defragmenting the MFT. I know this is not straight forward, Windows Defragmenter does not do it, and it should be done at boot-time.