Restoring files deleted from a compressed drive
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 11:04 am
Windows 95 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by thattoo
(10 messages posted)
I'm trying to help a friend recover some data from an old Packard Bell 486 box after
she had a bad couple of years with schizophrenia and deleted almost all of the files
that were stored within C:\DRVSPACE.000 on a 420MB hard drive.
Windows 95 boots and then asks me where the command interpreter is. If I point it
to A:\COMMAND.COM, I can run 'DIR' to see what's left on C:. Nearly all of the files
under C:\WINDOWS and C:\PROGRA~1 are gone, and I don't see a 'My Documents' or 'profiles'
folder listed anywhere.
But if I mount an image of the whole drive on Linux and run the 'strings' command
on the DRVSPACE.000 file, I can still see the names of deleted files, and some apparently
uncompressed registry keys from the deleted SYSTEM.DAT file can be read. (I'm hoping
to reinstall the OS on a bigger drive for her because the motherboard's BIOS can
handle it, but she lost her ProductID and most of her other software registration
codes along with everything else.)
I have my own copy of Windows 95 to run on another machine if necessary, with plenty
of room to store the restored files.
Is there any hope, short of giving nonexistent big bucks to a data recovery service?
I was warned not to use DriveSpace myself back then, so I'm mostly lost now. (I
would know how to restore the files if they weren't compressed. Only DriveSpace
is a mystery, but enough so that I can't come up with the right words to plug into
a search engine to look it up.)
~~~ The people out to get you are paranoid. ~~~
|
Responses to this message:
|
|
All messages in this thread [show all]
 | Restoring files deleted from a compressed drive (thattoo: Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 11:04 am) |
| |
| |
Return to the Windows 95 Discussion Forum
|
|
