Hello Vladas,
On 2006.07.06, at 9:56 PM, vladas wrote:
I have f****d up the first 10Mb of the 3Gb fat disk
(not partition, the whole 3Gb disk) full of windoze
shit. Then, due to time limits, made some of sort
of backup of the mess with dd and put Puffy into
that disk (dedicated install). The problem is that
management needs some of that stuff back <..>.
I would be grateful if anybody could give any hints
on how to grep the 3Gb backup image for any msdosfs
patterns so that I could get at least some of the
individual files back. Sorry for asking it like that
instead of just reading mount_msdos src silently
- maybe someone had this before..
I am posting this to misc@ because Puffy is the
only OS I run.
Do you have access to a Windows machine? The best file recovery
applications for FAT file systems I have found, are Windows apps,
oddly enough.
I have had great success with "Get Data Back". It is comparatively
very cheap yet was the best I have tried even amongst file recovery
apps costing thousands. They sell the FAT and NTFS versions
separately. In fact it finds files from multiple old file-systems
which even the "Forensic Tool Kit" does not find. I have used GDB ($
$) to compliment FTK ($$$$) in the past.
Last time I tried GDB, I believe it accepted images as one large
image, or images broken up into portions, but with the limitation
that the portions must be 688,128,000 bytes in size. If you need to
run GDB on a system limited to 2GB files, then use split(1) to break
the big dd image into the size GDB needs. The standard suffix split
uses is fine for GDB.
Run GDB against the files, answer a few simple questions and after a
while you might find a file listing of the old files, ready to be
copied off.
BTW, GDB *can* get data back even if both FAT's are completely gone
(it has for me).
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm
BTW, I have no affiliation with Runtime. It just saved my bacon once
under a pretty bleak situation (girlfriends data! Yikes). I've since
recommended it to others who also found it to get their data back. A
friend of mine had a motherboard die, he was using the motherboards
built in IDE "RAID" 0. I told him about GDB, I thought he tried it
and it worked for him. But I've since noticed that Runtime now has
recovery software specifically for disks used in a RAID, which might
have been what he used. Regardless, Runtime even got his files back.
Good luck,
Shane
