[ale] Drive recovery

[Mark Wright]

I have a drive that I would like to recover data from.  Reading the  
discussion about secure deleting of data was making me think.  This  
drive has nothing wrong except the table of contents can't be read  
and I cannot find any program or technique to read any data off it.   
If this is a security problem why isn't it easier to read a damaged  
disk?

I purchased a program called Data rescue that has saved unreadable  
zip disks for me but it cannot decode the data on this disk.  Data  
rescue reads blocks of data into memory and compares it to known  
format until it recognizes something.  I have let it run for weeks  
with no success.  I suppose too much formatting info is missing.  I  
know the data is laying out there to be read.  Anyone know of any  
utilities to examine bits on a disk?  This is  a Mac OS9 formatted  
disk, if it makes any difference.

If it is this hard to pull any data off a corrupt disk I would say  
that writing random data all across a hard drive to secure delete is  
a waste of time.  Nobody would go through what I have gone through to  
read this disk on a used purchase or a salvage disk  if they did not  
know something valuable was there.

Mark