Select a drive to search. Select a disk number (such as Disk 1) if there is no drive letter or if the drive has been deleted, resized, unsuccessfully merged or otherwise lost.

A Quick Search usually works well for searching a deleted or mildly corrupt drive, recovering accidentally deleted files or and for reconstructing a broken RAID or spanned volume. Use a Long Search to recover a reformatted drive, a badly corrupted volume or when a Quick Search is not effective. A Quick Search takes a few minutes to complete compared to a Long Search which may take several minutes to a few hours.

Recovered data must be saved to a drive other than the one holding the lost data. If the computer has insufficient free disk space, use a shared network folder on another computer, memory stick or external USB drive. You can also save a few gigabytes of data to the boot drive at a time and transfer it to a CD or DVD.