-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Clayton wrote:
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:
============================== /media/usbdrive> ls -al total 32 drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 16384 2008-06-21 17:28 ./ drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 16384 1970-01-01 01:00 ../ ?--------- ? ? ? ? ? Backup ?--------- ? ? ? ? ? Vids_1992 ?--------- ? ? ? ? ? Photos_1992 ==============================
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?
C.
Others have suggested a course of action and appropriate tools but I think no-one has indicated what exactly what you may be committing yourself to (and you may feel that you have better things to do in life :-) ). A quick glance at this suggests to me that the strongest probability is that you now have a rather large data jigsaw. How complex the jigsaw is will largely be dependant on how fragmented the drive is and how much of the FAT information has been lost. It looks as if you have completely lost the root directory entry points or root FAT entries which means the data is there but there is no information on how it is initially organised. The good news is that data recovery is almost certainly possible if damage is restricted to these areas (mainly because FAT is a very primitive file system), but the bad news is that it can be very time consuming to do that recovery. The tools identified will identify some parts of the jigsaw but you will probably need to rebuild and identify some files directly. If you have a backup restore from that, if not (apart from the obvious "why no backup?"), I hope whoever has asked you to do this is paying by the hour or this a small drive with relatively few large files. If it is your data this is a case of judging the time you spend putting the jigsaw together, against the time of rebuilding the data from other sources. Good luck... - -- ============================================================================== I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. Bjarne Stroustrup ============================================================================== -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAki9MxQACgkQasN0sSnLmgKFBwCg3yDazV6b6iKyncQMOYRS+xb4 d8MAoKC+dnuenNSUUj2abh8TF7icK7Y2 =oPTR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org