Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2003 22:34:46 +0800 From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] !File recovery crisis!
Hi Matt,
I've just had problem with Partition Magic destroying the file system on a desktop HDD with Win98 installed in one big FAT32 10GB partition.
Ouch!
I'm guessing the file system must have been badly corrupted. But there's one important file I'd like to retrieve from the root C:\ folder if possible.
Perhaps ... one thing to try may be to try and see if PM has blown away the second copy of your FAT ... I've just run across http://www.datarescue.com/laboratory/partition4.htm which talks about this sorta thing and has a few links, I've not read it too carefully (it seems to be about how to recover from a CIH virus attack) but it may be of use ...
I've been playing with the WinHex editor David mentioned a while back, and have had some luck retrieving part of the file running an automated file recovery option. But I'm only getting about 1/3 of the entire file. I'm wondering if there's a way to locate the remainder of the file's data, and reconstruct the whole thing manually.
OK what type of file is this and how big is it? Is it the sort that you could recognise portions of 'on sight' (eg. a text file), is it a 'reasonably' well behaved type (such as a jpeg) or is it one that goes everywhere (a bitmap, an encrypted file, etc.)? Also could you have a guess as to how fragmented the disk might have been? What I'm angling at here is how practical would it be to walk the disk manually, in the vicinity of where the other fragments are, in the hope of finding more bits and pieces? Don't laugh, I managed to recover most of the pictures from a memory card this way ... the card had been zapped and various logical holes formed, including over the equivalent of the FAT (to the extent that a computer trying to read it through a USB cardreader would freeze). I managed to get my libby to pick it up as a disk of some sort using a PCMCIA reader (but it still didn't know how big it was), I took a binary dump of it using Norton DiskTools (which somehow managed to figure it was 64MB) then I used a hex editor to figure out where file fragments started and ended and separated the files out ... now you've got a somewhat harder job, I knew that there were only jpeg files on this 'disk' so I knew what to look for at the start and end of things (and, for the most part, where 'mismatched' chunks where) but you may still have some success ...
Good luck!
- Raymond
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