Yes. Clearer. Dean Trower's utilities are working.
Best of luck to you.
On Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 6:25 pm, thattoo wrote:
>>I'm understanding you to say that you can read all the contents of drvspace.000.
>
>Not exactly. What I'm saying is that I can read all of the files that can be
>restored by either DriveSpace3 or PC Inspector File Recovery—i.e., the data
>that, through the use of those two programs, can be copied to a never-compressed
>drive as files that have intact file information, or that have filenames whose first
>character only was replaced with an underscore, or that have been assigned a 'cluster
>[some number]' filename because the file recovery program found whatever kind of
>metadata it happened to be looking for, wherever it happened to be looking for it.
> (I don't know exactly what it does and does not try to find; it is freeware, but
>it's not open source.) Many of the files I did restore are corrupted, apparently
>as a result of a common problem described in the documentation for that 'DriveSpace
>3 Disaster Recovery Kit' software.
>I don't know how to read the rest of the decompressed raw data from the area
within
>that DRVSPACE.000 file. With that freeware file recovery program, I was able to
>retrieve only about 700MB out of nearly 900MB total. When that software copies
the
>data to a separate drive to restore the files, it's not smart enough to replace
gibberish
>characters with valid file information to prevent Windows from assuming that the
>destination hard drive is full (despite that drive's having a whole 5GB of free
space,
>compared to less than 1GB of decompressed data that could possibly need to be stored
>on it).
>That corrupted file information prevents me from retrieving any deleted files
>from at least two directories. One is the root directory, not a good one to do
without
>when I want to reinstall the OS on an unfamiliar machine; and the other, alas, is
>the folder containing my friend's personal data.
>I can't decompress the drive and expect to retrieve all of the free space, because
>most of the free space is exactly what the DriveSpace program is likely to discard
>to make room for the files it believes to exist, which take up 390MB out of just
>a little over 400. But because I do have a backup image of the whole drive, I will
>try it once, just in case some bug or fluke makes a 'My Documents' folder magically
>appear out of nowhere. (When I mount the drive, all that shows up in an Explorer
>window is the same thing I pulled up with 'DIR' at the DOS prompt on her machine
>when I booted C: and had to tell what was left of the OS that the command interpreter
>was on a floppy: about 100MBs' worth of mostly useless files, and I do have the
>folder options set to display every file that Explorer will let me display.)
>If I want to help her, I need to start with the assumption that at least some
>of her personal files were not overwritten. I might be able to read the
>rest by going through the data, one tiny piece at a time, with that 'Disaster Recovery
>Kit' program, because the problem I'm having here seems to be just the sort of problem
>that that software was written to solve.
>But I'm really hoping that, after all these years, someone would know
>of some easier way that just wouldn't happen to occur to me when I haven't been
using
>Windows much lately.
>Now I'm in the middle of finding out whether the Cygwin port of dd can interpret
>a mounted 'drive' as a real drive and write the whole file's decompressed contents
>to a drive image file. I don't want to get my hopes up too high there, but it does
>seem possible.
>I've also found an old Linux kernel module called 'dmsdos' that's said to have
>had some success in reading those sadistic DRVSPACE.### files, but I haven't
>seen anything said about its being able to recover arbitrary raw data when the FAT
>has been mangled.
>Is my situation a little clearer now?
>You've been kind, ancien.
