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There are two modes to try and analyse the partitions on a disk.  One is to recover the current partitions.  The second is to try and recover a previous setup of partitions on a disk that has been repartitioned.

Reconstruct current partitions

This is the quick mode.  The program will start scanning the start of the drive until it finds a media partition sector.  At this point it will try and follow the partitions through the disk until the end if reached.  If the partitions do not chain, then the program will continue scanninmg every sector - this is obvously slow.

If no partitions are found, the program does try and detect the type of operating system on the disk.  For instance NTFS and FAT disks will be detected.

Search for previous partitions

This is mode where the whole disk is scanned for possible partition starts.  Obviously this can be slow, but find all possible partitions. Each possible partition start will be analysed but only ones that point to a valid FAT start or NTFS entry will be displayed. This way most false entries will be ignored

Stop searching when first partition found

Many disks are known to have only a single partition. If this is the case, then checking this box may save a considerable period of time, preventing the program searching for other possible partitions.

Test for partition

There are flags that must be set to indicate which partitions are to be tested for. Thus if only searching for a NTFS partition, but setting just the NTFS flag, no FAT partitions will be detected.  There must always be one partition type set, but any combination can be used.

As the program scans through the disk, the partition fields will be updated.  If it is felt that valid information has been added, then the scanning can be cancelled and values found to date will be used.  Often, partition information is only at the start of a disk, so there is little requirement to scan a complete 500GB disk