OT-File recovery

[Rick Stevens]

Bruce McDonald wrote:
> 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?  

It depends on what happened to the filesystem between the time the files
were deleted and the time you try to recover them.  When a file is
deleted, what actually happens is that the directory entry for the file
is actually marked as "unused" as are all of the bits of the disk used
to make up the file.  When new data is written to the disk, the "unused"
space is reused as needed.

That means that if you delete files, then IMMEDIATELY try to recover
them (before anything else gets to try to write to the disk), your odds
of recovery are excellent.  If, however, something new gets written to
the disk, whatever bits of the disk that were reused by the new file are
unrecoverable for the old file.

Now, as to FAT32 recoveries...there are tons of tools.  Norton
Utilities is one of the best and it's fairly cheap ($50 or so).  If you
want freeware, a google search for "file recovery" should net a whole
bunch of stuff.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  Diplomacy: The art of saying "Nice doggy!" until you can find a   -
-                            big enough rock.                        -
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