Did "force rebuild index" do that? How could it?

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djcvo
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2019 3:40 pm

Did "force rebuild index" do that? How could it?

Post by djcvo »

I'm trying to understand some behavior by Everything that is, if anything, better than I could expect under the circumstances. I'll explain.

Yesterday I tried to move an NTFS partition (on Windows 7 Pro) using a well-known partition manager booted from a flash drive, and the process failed failed. Not only did it fail, but the partition structure was damaged, so that Windows (7 Pro) no longer recognizes it as formatted.

To my amazement, Everything still showed results for files on that partition. That seemed strange to me, so I clicked to "Force Rebuild". Everything again showed files on that partition, and I used the opportunity to export the list. After some hours I did another forced rebuild, and now Everything shows no results for the partition.

What exactly happened here?

I'm working to recover the files, but that's another matter.
therube
Posts: 4610
Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2009 6:48 pm

Re: Did "force rebuild index" do that? How could it?

Post by therube »

Oh, so this was not a boot drive.

I'll guess ... man, what a guess it will be ...

(initially) that Everything simply no longer saw the drive, yet retained its results
(force rebuild) ignored that the drive was not there, but read the MFT, which was accessible, so was able to update
(2nd force) at that point the MFT contents were also no longer available, so nothing at that point
raccoon
Posts: 1017
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2018 1:24 am

Re: Did "force rebuild index" do that? How could it?

Post by raccoon »

My guess is that you just didn't wait long enough for the Force Rebuild to complete, since there are no visual progress indicators. It's not immediate, so you were still seeing the cached results pre-rebuild.
djcvo
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2019 3:40 pm

Re: Did "force rebuild index" do that? How could it?

Post by djcvo »

Thanks for the responses. I think the guess is correct that I didn't wait long enough, because I just did another force rebuild, and once again (after waiting for it to complete) Everything shows results from the damaged partition.

However, Windows still won't mount it, and the recovery software I'm using indicates explicitly that the MFT is damaged. (I suppose that could be mistaken. Or perhaps the MFT isn't damaged much.) So although Everything can find files on the otherwise-unreadable partition, I can't get at them through Everything's results or through the normal Windows mechanisms.

I give Everything (and its author!) full credit for being so clever, and I wish I could turn it into being able to recover the files from that partition.
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