[rescue] Data rescue

[Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 03:38:22PM -0500, Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
> I have a friend (a PC user) who had some massive corruption on an
> 8 Gig IDE hard drive.  (the FAT tables got toasted).

Depending on the version of FAT used, I think there are some backup
FAT tables.

No doubt NortNuts screwed it up though.

> And NO, there were no backups...

Well,  he is screwed.

You MIGHT try mounting it read-only on a Linux box.

> Also, to make matters worse, he had a friend try Norton's on it, and let
> it make changes.... it recovered lots of dirs, but the file pointers are
> almost all wrong such that the jpeg images are all "busted".

require "Pooch::Screwed"
 
> I tried to make an image into a file with Linux, and it got to 2 gig
> and said max filesize reached (using dd).  I don't know if that is a limitation
> of VFAT filesystems where I was writing the image, or if Linux has a 2 gig
> filesize limit.

Some versions of the Linux kernel do have this limitation.

I am not optimistic, but admire your courage in trying...

--Patrick