I'd say the chances of your friend recoverings his/her data are very slim. The
right thing to do in such a case is to keep the filesystem as untouched as
possible and then run some data recovery tool such as
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm or
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download. Try File Recovery, it saved me more than
once, and it's free.
Another option would be sending the disk to a data recovery company, but it
will be VERY costly. Regards,
Georger
----- Mensagem original ----
De: Georg Altmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Para: bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Enviadas: Sexta-feira, 8 de Dezembro de 2006 10:45:45
Assunto: [Bacula-users] Off-topic: FAT32 disaster recovery
Hello,
I know this is off topic, but I hope to reach some people on this list, who
might be able to help me with the daunting task I am facing. Please excuse
the impertinence to post it here. The whole story is a bit lengthy - just
ignore the post in case you're not interested.
A friend of mine, who is an architectural student, contacted me because of
a problem with his external hard drive, containing a FAT32 partition which
he had attached to his PowerBook. Possibly because of a failure of the USB
electronics of the hard drive, the disk was disconnected from the system
without being properly unmounted. He better had used bacula to backup his
data, because apparently the file system was damaged without Mac OS X
noticing this. Instead he ignored the error and continued to write data to
the disk. Later he noticed, that he could not open certain PDF files
because they are corrupted in some way (at least Acrobat says that).
Now (to late) he realised his misery and now I have the pleasure to try to
restore his data. The first thing to do, is of course to create an image of
the whole partition, to prevent the destruction of further data.
Unfortunately nice people from Redmond can get in your way here. I attached
the FireWire disk to my desktop, booted Windows XP and in it's ingenuity,
it detected the file system on the disk was corrupted, and ran chkdsk over
it before I would have hit the "any key". chkdsk moved all lost clusters to
a directory FOUND.000 containing enumerated files FILE0000.CHK.
Additionally there are files with the names of directories which existed on
the fs. Using the UNIX file utility and some shell scripting, I was able to
sort these files into directories on an other disk, each containing one
file-type. It appears like PDF and Photoshop files are mostly okay, but for
example most PDF and TIFF files are corrupted.
Now, I know that there is a plethora of file system recovery tools claiming
to be able to restore all files. Though, I would like to know, if there is
any chance to restore the original FAT32 file system structures after the
disastrous chkdsk run or if I have to live with the .chk files. My
knowledge of FAT32's internal structures is next to zero and so I am not
sure how to proceed. Enchantingly I couldn't find any info on what exactly
chkdsk is doing in the MS knowledge base. So I would appreciate if anyone
could give me some information on this and to know if I have any better
options to restore data, other than the .chk files.
My personal judgment is, that files already got corrupted by Mac OS X
writing to the damaged filesystem and thereby overwriting blocks (clusters?
"chains"? whatever) it mistakenly deemed free, but in reality belonged to
already existing files.
Anyway, this teaches us once more, that you should
a) make regular backups (doh!)
b) not rely on external hard disks for this
c) not at all use crappy filesystems such as FAT32
Thank you for reading all this!
Regards,
Georg
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