About a year ago, I unplugged my 300GB Western Digital external hard drive the wrong way, and the next thing I got after plugging it again is that the drive has a capacity of zero bytes and it is formatted as a raw partition. I was unable to repair it until some months ago, I got a laptop that runs on Windows 7 with an Intel Atom N450 processor and 1 GB of RAM.
One of the tools I’ve tried is Zero Assumption Recovery, which turned out to be very slow. Almost 47 hours into the process, it has only made 4% progress in what is supposed to be a “quick mode pre-scan” and Process Manager reports a response time of over a second every time zar.exe tries to read data from the hard drive.
Considering my laptop’s specs, are there other tools that can do the recovery process faster, or should I wait for ZAR to finish? If I should wait, for how many more days should I wait?