re: Restoring files deleted from a compressed drive
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Windows 95 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by ancien
(46 messages posted)
I'm understanding you to say that you can read all the contents of drvspace.000.
If her files are not in drvspace.000 you are probably out of luck. The supposed ability
to recover files once they have been overwritten is IMHO an urban myth.
DriveSpace checks the reliability of your disk before it begins. That's normal. DriveSpace
appeared with MSDOS 6.22 replacing the earlier DoubleSpace. MS changed the name because
they were facing a lawsuit from Stac Electronics over similarities to its Stacker
file compression utility.Commands are the same. Windows 95 added a GUI and some extra
tools, but it's still the same DOS program. You can work on the file entirely in
DOS.
The following source gives an explanation of the DOS syntax and operations. Don't
change the caps to lower case. If you do the link won't work.
http://us.geocities.com/rick_lively/MANUALS/COMMANDS/D/DBLSPACE.HTM
One idea is to decompress the entire drive and see what you get. Try your file recovery
program again or use a hex editor to look for data. It would be a whole lot of work.
My own success with file recovery programs has been very good with .jpg files and
not good with Office files. Maybe it's because they are in a proprietary format.
If you uncompress H it should become what was C the root drive, but with a different
drive letter. All sectors will be overwritten, but you have said you can't find anything
on the compressed drive anyway.
In Windows 95 it's Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > DriveSpace. Left-click
DriveSpace, highlight the drive you want to work with from the list. In the Drive
menu from the toolbar, select Uncompress, and left-click Start. You must have enough
room on the drive for all the decompressed files or it will abort.
On Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 8:49 am, thattoo wrote:
>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. ~~~
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