Re: data recovery-2

It depends. I've had a usb drive that just stopped working for no
apparent reason. When I plugged it in, it just got hot really fast, so
it was pretty much toast. I lost about a week's worth of work on my
final CS project. (I have a script for my new drive that automatically
backs up every time I mount it.)

On the other hand, if it's recognized when you insert it and being
assigned a /dev location, the best thing you can do immediately is 'cat
/dev/whatever > somefile' to preserve the data in case the drive is
becoming more and more corrupted. If you can write what you can from
the drive, that will allow you to have a backup that you can work with
freely (make sure to back up the dump file before messing with it).

I have written a small Java program that will scan card dumps like this
and extract any jpg data it finds, which I have used twice to recover
corrupt camera cards with around 80-90% success rate. It sounds like
she has more word processing, spreadsheet, etc documents though - but
the principle remains the same, you just need to know what you are
looking for. You can use a hex editor (iirc, khexedit worked well for
me, which comes with KDE) to look through the file searching for data
that looks familiar. With reletively little work, you could probably
extract some text, which would then have to be reformatted and stuff,
but at least it's something.

Justin

William Bouterse wrote:

>This is a repeat of earlier message which never showed up on the list so
>my apologies if suddenly there are now repeats.
>
>A nearby small business owner and friend recently discovered her 512mg
>pen-type usb2 drive
>was corrupted. After having checked it out myself I found it is
>recognized as being inserted but
>i/o errors and "no file system found" messages.....
>
>Does anyone have recommended data recovery service in Anchorage? She
>has about 50 hours
>of work on this device and could pay up to 200$ for recovery.
>Inadvertently forgot to have a backup
>of her critical data . (A familiar refrain for any of us who have done
>this ourselves though hopefully we learn from our mistakes ! )
>
>Or are this units pretty much un-salvage-able?
>
>Thanks
>
>William (Bill) Bouterse
>Talkeetna Area
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Received on Sun Oct 2 20:09:48 2005