This is a followup to my earlier question about data recovery. The situation now stands:
We purchased Data Rescue v10.4.1 and attempted to find files on the hosed eMac hard drive. After letting it run for three days it told us we still had some 17,000 minutes to go (which works out to roughly, oh, 11.80555555555556 days), so we called ProSoft's tech support for advice. They suggested we drop back to an earlier version, 10.3, and try that. Using Data Rescue v10.3, running "Thorough Scan" (Quick Scan is grayed out), I get the following (somewhat hopeful) message: "Files were found, but the Allocation Block Layout (ABL) is unknown. No files can be recovered without this information. Would you like to open the ABL Settings window?" Well, of course I would, and did. And was presented with a window that asks me manually to enter the hard drive's block size and "base block" offset. Upon further inquiry (reading the PDF manual) I learned that an HFS+ volume "typically" has a block size of 8, although it can be any power of 2 up to 64, and that, although HFS+'s base block "theoretically" could have an offset of 0, in practice there usually is an HFS "wrapper" around the HFS+ volume and the size of that wrapper determines the actual base block offset. So . . . if anyone is still awake out there and if any of the above made any sense to you, can you suggest any numbers I might try entering for, primarily, the base block offset -- which is to say, how many blocks of "wrapper" might surround my HFS+ volume -- and secondarily, the block size (I will assume 8 for the latter, unless I hear differently)? Thanks, Dan | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
