On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 10:18 PM, Clayton
I am working on trying to recover some data from a hard drive (FAT32 formatted). The drive can be mounted OK (mounted in a USB external drive housing), but the data is not accessible. When I do an ls -al, I get this back:
...
So... something is seriously wrong... obviously... but the question is... is there any hope? Does anyone know any method, or tools (Linux, Windows, whatever) that can be used to recover at least some of the data?
Hi, First of all try to make full image of formatted drive, save to some safe place and make all experiments with a copy - you can check out the ddrescue utility for that (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/). Then I can't give linux tools for that - I just had such problem few years ago - I had to resurrect photos from photo memory card - and did try some programs under windows. There are 2 general types of tools for that - the 1st ones do scan file system header table and try to search file names which were marked as deleted, but still point to some address in the hard drive - so they display the list of corrupted filenames and you try to check them one by one and see if something is alive. If you have written a number of small files to the corrupted disk after that, the record in the file system table might be overwritten by the new names, and though the file body would still be present physically on the disk, this type of recovery tools will not find it. The 2nd type does not care about file table - it scans the whole disk image and searches the files of the particular type by their header. For example, you tell it to find all jpg images on the disk - and it starts searching for them sector by sector and puts everything it finds to some output folder. Executable programs etc are not recovered by this method, but actually I did not care about them I did not have much success with the 1st type of tools, and the 2nd tool saved me most of the lost photos (I have seen only one tool of such class - "PC Inspector Smart Recovery" - I have found it here http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/smartrecovery.htm - it seems to be free). I can advise you to try them all - some program can recover the files which would not be recovered by another program and vice versa. And actually, I still keep the 1gb image of the memory card - not all photos were recovered correctly at that time and I hope to try some other tools once - would be interesting to learn about linux tools for that. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org