Data recovery question

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ToolPackinMama

I know a lady whose file allocation table is messed up. What can be done
to rescue her data?
 
ToolPackinMama said:
I know a lady whose file allocation table is messed up. What can be done
to rescue her data?
Click to expand...

Well, the data's still there; it's just that the information about what
parts of it go where that's lost. What I'd suggest is to create an
complete image file from the disk, and then try to get the data out of
the image file; this will prevent having things get chewed up worse (and
potentially overwritten) while you're trying to work on it.

I've heard very good recommendations for a program called WinHex; it's
available for download for a fairly reasonable fee ($30, I think?), and
has a free version that you can try -- but, unfortunately, the free
version doesn't do anything but very small files. I don't remember the
url for it, but Googling should find it.

Most likely, what you'll end up recovering is bits and pieces of files.
If they weren't fragmented, it's possible that WinHex can tell where the
files begin and end and get whole files, but I wouldn't rely on it.
What this means is that you should be able to get a large percentage of
whatever text files were on the system, and possibly a fair bit of
whatever text was in MS Word files or such like that. I wouldn't hold
out that much hope for things like zipfiles or images or such, though,
or for saving whatever formatting was in the Word files -- all of those
things are heavily dependent on having the whole file and in the right
order.

There's also, I suppose, the possibility that the FAT table could be
resurrected if it's not too badly chewed; I don't know anything about
how that would work, though.

- Brooks
 
Brooks Moses said this...
There's also, I suppose, the possibility that the FAT table could be
resurrected if it's not too badly chewed; I don't know anything about
how that would work, though.
Click to expand...

It may be worth posting this question in comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
there's some VERY smart people in there.
 
I know a lady whose file allocation table is messed up. What can be done
to rescue her data?
Click to expand...

If this is a win9x or older system you can try
Fdisk/mbr to refresh the FAT from the back up copy
that is stored on the drive it self

thats just My two cents.
 
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