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:
/dev/sdb
--and hit Enter to continue.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.)Other
, the highlighted default.Many thanks, Christophe; you ought to be receiving one of your US Amazon wish-list items from us shortly.
watch anime
i got my life back
This was also true for older versions of Ubuntu, but (curiously enough) when I forget to unmount from Ubuntu and it won't recognize the drive again, mounting it and unmounting it safely from Windows seems to magically fix it.
If you just step through the program it will give you the option to save the files, at which point you can browse around the file system and or select "Y" to accept the location to store the files. In my case it also created a RECUP_D1.DIR which is just a standard directory where it saved all my files without issue. This program was fantastic in that it recovered my files.
Also, with regards to your Excel spreadsheets, feel free to write a better program, this program is given to the world for free for you to use and all you do is bitch and complain because you can't figure out how to use it?
And Photorec does not support .xls files? Come on. Everybody needs to get their Excel spreadsheets. I sure a hope a better program comes along soon.
Did you try creating a dd_rescue image of the physical drive first then recovering the data from that?
Chris
Thanks
i downloaded PhotoRec, but i can't find my USB, it's usually under Removable Disk L:
only my HD was in the list of options
I don't know what to do, can someone help me?
PhotoRec restored files but without the original names, and in a serial sequence. It also was unable to tell older deleted files apart from the current files as of the partition wipe. Both are excellent tools, however. It's just a matter what situation to apply each one to.
Folks, remember to do your back-ups, and to try free solutions first and send the authors your support if they work.