PhotoRec process bug

[LeFrettchen]

Hi everybody.

Three days ago, I accidentaly killed my wife's Windows partition on our Mac.
To recover the data, I discovered PhotoRec and TestDisk.

Wonderful softwares, easy to use and powerful.
But really, really slow.
It took 20 hours to scan the entire 250 Gb Windows HDD.

At the end of the research, I closed every softwares, cause the CPU's temperature was really high, 95°C~203°F, and the fan was running harsh.
Didn't change anything.

I took a look at the activity monitor : a process photorec was still running, at 100% CPU charge.
I also took a look at the thermal sensors : the CPU was permanently altenating between two cores.
This part, I think, is an OS behaviour : OS X alternates cores to prevend overheating.

Had to kill the photorec process myself, and the system returned to normal state.

----------------

Today, I made a new research, and same player shoot again, same score : 95°C~203°F, CPU full charge even when PhotoRec is closed, etc...
Apparently, PhotoRec bugs when the CPU is stressed.


I send a mail to PhotoRec creator/maintainer, Christophe GRENIER.
So I just wrote this thread for information, or just in case someone has an idea/wants to help.

[jggimi]

For these sorts of data recoveries I have used sleuthkit and its webserver-browser tool, autopsy. See www.sleuthkit.org.

[LeFrettchen]

Well, I'll take a look.

Thanks jggimi

[Carpetsmoker]

Three days ago, I accidentaly killed my wife's Windows partition on our Mac.

What did you do, exactly? If you just removed the partition, you can usually use testdisk to recover the partition.

photorec searches for known file headers/signatures, and tries to recover individual files. It has *no* knowledge of the filesystem, and doesn't deal with fragmentation. It *may* work quite well for some files (like photos), but often won't work so well for others types of files (like documents which have grown over time).

[LeFrettchen]

Thanks Carpetsmoker, but of course, no I didn't just remove the partition.
Would have been too easy

No, I created a new partition of OpenBSD by shrinking my Mac OS X partition.
Then I installed OpenBSD, fine and easy, and downloaded all packages and so on...

I just discovered the problem the day after, when my wife told me Windows didn't boot.
I didn't install OpenBSD on the good partition, but on the Windows' one. Crap.