Easy Flash Drive Data Recovery with PhotoRec .:. kentbrewster.com

Had a bit of trouble today: one of Vickie's two-gig thumb drives went catatonic. All Windows could come up with was the scary message that the disk in drive E wasn't formatted, and did she want to format it now? (Answer: nooooooo!) After a bit of investigation--the usual stuff: reboot, pray, try it on several machines, sacrifice a chicken--we came to the conclusion that the thing's file system had broken.

So, armed with foggy memories of how Norton Utilities used to work, off I went into the wilds of the Net, searching for recovery advice. Mostly I found questionable stuff; there are many operators out there who will charge you hundreds of dollars to take a crack at your data with no guarantees, and there are plenty of freeware/shareware downloads that claim to recover lost files but were last updated in 1997, and have since been turned into those $49.95 bloatware packages you see at Office Depot. Most of these are about hard drives or floppy disks, not memory sticks; I tried a half-dozen, but got nothing back from Vickie's poor dead baby.

Finally I found Christophe Grenier's TestDisk/PhotoRec suite, at http://cgsecurity.org. PhotoRec ignores the file system in favor of finding lost files, so it works on FAT, NTFS, EXT2/EXT3, HFS, and (with certain caveats) ReiserFS. And since it's looking for known file headers and using data carving techniques, more than eighty file types--among them DOC, PDF, and PPT--are instantly recoverable. Here's how it went:

• I downloaded the ZIP file, extracted it to my desktop--no installation required, awesome!--and fired up PhotoRec. After smiling at the text-only interface, I hit the down-arrow to highlight the drive--in my case it was /dev/sdb--and hit Enter to continue.
• Next I needed to choose the partition table type. Not knowing what else to do, I chose Intel, since the last time the thing had run successfully was on a Windows machine. (I'm guessing this would want to be set to Macintosh if one was attempting recovery from a Mac-formatted iPod.)
• The next screen showed an empty partition and a FAT16 partition, both of which took up pretty much the entire disk. I crossed my fingers and hit Enter again, choosing the empty partition.
• Next, it asked me to choose my filesystem; I was pretty sure we weren't looking at an EXT2/EXT3 system, so I hit Enter to accept Other, the highlighted default.
• Finally it asked for a location to store recovered data; I went again with the default, which creates a new directory wherever you have the program installed. And we were off and running; the first file to pop up was a PDF, and since my new directory showed thumbnails by default, I could see that everything was going to be okay. Four minutes later, we were all done; all Vickie had to do was re-create her directory structure, re-name her files, and figure out which belonged where.

Many thanks, Christophe; you ought to be receiving one of your US Amazon wish-list items from us shortly.

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Alex Krenvalk .:. 20080317053817

On as regards flash drive data recovery i know little,but for restore zip files,use-zip file recovery,application is the fact that it employs several heuristic algorithms and methods to repair zip file or recover information from damaged zip files, use of multiple algorithms allows the program to minimize data loss during zip recovery, therefore the user sees as much as possible about the files being recovered,will have to enter the password when prompted and the application will make a fix zip file attempt using the specified password,program supports Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows XP SP2, Windows 2003 and Windows Vista.