[ale] Suggestions for HD data recovery

[Joseph A Knapka]

Chris Egolf wrote:
> 
> cfowler wrote:
> > I think you are srewed on that one.  You may can try dd but you may have
> > to resort to hiring a professional data recovery service.
> >
> I thought about using dd, but I think I would need some sort of hard
> drive HEX editor too to examine the file, not to mention some knowledge
> of the FAT and file layout.  I'm beginning to think your right about
> being screwed.

If the drive has been reformatted, the FAT information for
the previous filesystem has been destroyed anyway. All you
have left is a collection of disk sectors containing
file contents, probably distributed more-or-less randomly
across the disk. What a data-recovery service would do,
I imagine, is something like:

dd if=/dev/hosed_drive of=/dev/recovery_partition

and then spend a couple of weeks with "emacs ESC-x hexl-mode"
trying to figure out which disk sectors used to be part of the
same files. You probably have as good a chance of figuring
this out yourself, if you are looking to restore a particular
file and have some idea of what the contents should
look like. It will, of course, be a lot easier if the
file you're trying to recover is a text file rather than
a binary.

OTOH I understand that it's possible for "traces" of
old data to survive disk rewrites, so it's possible
the professional recovery folks have magic hardware
and software that can recover data even from the
sectors that have been overwritten, which would
make the job a whole lot easier.

Cheers,

-- Joe
    Any OS distinguishable from Windows is not sufficiently broken.

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