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A common problem with many disks can result from 'operator' error. A typical scenario is when a disk is repartitioned, or reformatted.  The end result is a working disk, but with some or all files missing.  CnW Recovery can help.

One approach is a logical read followed by an Image Raw to find files in unallocated space and a deduplicate.  There are two straight forward stages to this process.

Stage 1

Read the disk with the standard recover function but select the 'recover unallocated area'.  In this mode, the program will first read all the files and internally record the locations that they are stored in.  The second stage is that it will perform an Image Raw, and extract files, but ignoring any area of the disk that has been previously read.  The result is the !recover directory just contains files from the unallocated area of the disk, which will represent all possible missing files.  NB, there will obviously be problems if the original files have been fragmented.

Stage 2

It is very common to find old copies of files within the unallocated area.  This is where the deduplicate function is used.  By selecting the log and the DeDup function, all duplicate files will be removed.  The program works so that in preference it will remove any file that was read from the unallocated space, and retain files read in the main file system.  The final result is that only one instance of any file will remain.  It should be noted that some program files are actually stored in multiple locations, so do not run this function on a working disk image, but only when trying to process data files.

To assist in recovering may be just photos, the file filter is a useful option.  It can be selected so that only JPGs are recovered. This procedure is totally compatible with the method outlined above.