re: Restoring files deleted from a compressed drive
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Windows 95 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by ancien
(46 messages posted)
There are plenty of detailed posts giving step by step instructions on how to edit
the environment files to be sure drvspace is running and all drives are mounted.
Try:
www.windowsbbs.com/windows-95-98-me-nt/72813-win95-no-boot-missing-operating-system.html
or google drvspace.000
There seem to be at least three methods:
1. Mount the HD as a second drive on a running Win95 or 98 system.
2. Use a Win95 or 98 floppy to boot the system and mount the drive.
3. Apparently you can even mount the drive using some WinXP systems.
Whatever you do, don't write to the compressed volume if you want to recover files.
On Monday, April 13, 2009 at 11:04 am, thattoo wrote:
>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.)
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