OT-File recovery

[Bruce McDonald]

Hello Bruce

On 01-Apr-05, you wrote:

> Hello Everyone,

> Do any of you know of a good file recovery utility that works on FAT32
> filesystems?

> <sighs>  Yes, I _know_ I should have had a more recent backup of the
> system....

> Backstory: My wife uses Netscape 7.1 for her email and newsgroups. The
> first time she would run it after a fresh bootup it would ask which
> profile to use. There was only one profile, default. This has been vexing
> her for some time. Wednesday she was sick with a cold and suffering from a
> fever and when it asked for the profile.... in a fit of pique, she deleted
> the profile. To make matters worse, she had been planning on moving up to
> 7.2, which she did right after deleting the profile. So now there is a new
> "salt" file where the old one was and she has none of her email addresses
> or important email messages from the past year.

> I have looked at the drive with PC File Recovery and it did find a couple
> of emails, but I know it can't track the file past the first cluster it is
> on.
> I despair of recovering the information since the settings area has been
> written to after the file was deleted.

> Is there a program out there that can try and piece together the clusters?
> Or at least let me see the data on each cluster so I can recreate as much
> of the email file as possible?

> I could boot a linux cd on the computer and mount the drive under linux if
> there is a linux utility to fit the bill.



> Thank you in advance.

I hope this was not written off as an April fools joke since it had the
unfortunate luck of being written on the 1st.  I am still hoping that
someone knows something that will help recover the files that were lost.  I
have tried R-Studio recovery, and while it listed the directories and some
of the files; the true files were not there.  It seems to have been unable
to follow the trail of data over the drive.  Any suggestions?  

Sincerely,
Bruce McDonald