re: Restoring files deleted from a compressed drive
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 8:49 am
Windows 95 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by thattoo
(10 messages posted)
Thanks for the quick response, ancien. The link you provided was informative
because I had encountered the same needlessly confusing drive labels that the person
requesting help on windowsbbs.com had seen.
When I run DriveSpace3 from Windows to mount the drive where it's attached as
a slave, it tells me that I have to run ScanDisk first to repair errors. But then
ScanDisk doesn't find any errors, nor does it report that it found any lost file
fragments.
Then, what I see on the mounted drive in an Explorer window is a list of only
the same few compressed files that my friend didn't delete (the all-but-empty WINDOWS
directory, for example, with the SYSTEM subdirectory missing).
If I run PC Inspector
File Recovery then, it does find a lot of what was in the 'Program Files' directory.
There's also a _YSTEM.DA0 file in a deleted Windows directory within the RECYCLED
folder, with human-readable Windows 95 and Office 97 ProductID codes, but I see no
sign of anything resembling USER.DAT. I also still see no trace of her personal
files or of any folder where they would ordinarily be stored, and no sign of a file
shredding program. (She doesn't remember ever using one, either; she said she'd
just kept hitting the Delete key in an Explorer window.)
So I'm wondering whether some program other than DriveSpace3 is out there that
would be able to read directly from a backup copy of her DRVSPACE.000 file and spit
out the decompressed raw data that may include some of her personal files. I found
some freeware called "Drivespace
3 Disaster Recovery Kit" that may help, but its author warns that finding lost
files with his software is an extremely time-consuming task. He was kind enough
to make the source code available, but I don't know Pascal, and I'm a bit surprised
not to have found yet that anyone else has already written some sort of front end
for it.
Any ideas?
As I indicated, I've already made a backup image of the whole drive (by running
'dd if=/dev/hdb of=/mnt/sda1/pb1666cd.img' on Linux to save everything
to a file on a USB stick before letting Windows touch the data), so I can experiment
and not risk losing what was still there when my friend brought her computer to me.
~~~ The people out to get you are paranoid. ~~~
On Monday, April 13, 2009 at 7:44 pm, ancien wrote:
>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.
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