DDS 10.0

[hart]

Here is the situation...
A disk was running under Win98SE. Someone was supposed to move the data to XP. Someone thought they had a blank drive and mounted XP on it. Well, the drive was the one with all the old data on it.
Long story short... there were baby pictures on the old drive... 5 years worth...:-[ I have the drive mounted as a slave (NTFS) and can see the new install. When I search the drive with DDS (HEX display) I can search for Kodak Pictures and there are entries for .jpg files in a Kodak Pictures directory. I can't see any Kodak Pictures folder with Explorer. Is there any way I can scrape those files from the drive? In the old days Norton Utilities could let me undelete files and recovery directories... Can Acronis do anything similar?

[Acronis Support]

Hello hart,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/).

I'm afraid that Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 cannot recover separate files or folders. It only allows you to recover deleted or lost partitions of a hard drive.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

[hart]

:'( So Acronis can't help? Buyer beware...:thumbd: - I retract statement made in haste... sorry...

[pvsurfer]

{QUOTE-> :'( So Acronis can't help? Buyer beware...:thumbd: <-QUOTE}
That's not really fair, as DDS10 does not claim to be a data recovery product... But so that I can try to help you, please confirm that the file system of the partition in question is NTFS.

In the meantime, make sure nothing else is written to that drive and don't remove or rearrange anything on the drive! Since data-recovery can be a risky process, I strongly advise you to copy or backup the partition in question to another hard drive or other media.

~pv

[hart]

{QUOTE-> That's not really fair, as DDS10 does not claim to be a data recovery product... <-QUOTE}
My apology... I guess I read too much into the DDS product description ( http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/disk-editing.html ) {QUOTE-> ...recovering important data areas of a hard drive; search and/or extraction of information that was removed by accident... <-QUOTE}

The file system of the partition in question is NTFS. Nothing else has been written to that drive nor rearranged. There is nothing on the NTFS partition that is of interest... it is only the old stuff that was on it before, the *.jpg files, that I care about. If I were able to find the old *.wab files, that would be nice but much less important.

Any help would be appreciated!
Here is some basic drive information...
Disk partition is 18.64 GB NTFS, Used: 2.439 GB, Free: 16.2 GB, Unallocated: 7.844 MB.
Using the Editor, Hex view, I searched for "Kodak Pictures" - I know that was the folder that had the pictures. I found an entry at Sector 657,061 Position 261, like: "C:\My Documents\My Pictures\Kodak Pictures\2003-07-15\101_105.JPG", with other information about the media, length, etc., around it.
Because the XP was installed on the disk as 'new' and not an upgrade, I'm guessing that only the 2.4 GB of used space has over written data on the physical disk. I believe I'm seeing the old data that was left over in the 16.2 GB of 'free' space. If I explore/search the disk with XP I don't find any entry for "Kodak Pictures". Seems the trick now is how to find what's left of the *.jpg files. I don't expect to get everything, but anything would be nice. The original disk was almost full and most of the picture files were probably using contiguous space at the 'end' of the drive.
The last time I had to do this kind of stuff was with Norton Utilities, a long time ago, under DOS, Win31, and Win95 - I was able to recover deleted files, undelete folders/directories, etc., so I do understand a bit about file system structure - I also understand how things have changed! Wish I knew more:-\

Again, any help or advice is appreciated... Is there any other software out there that can do direct disk reads/data recovery? That works?

[pvsurfer]

At work, we have used GetDataBack-NTFS for data/image file recovery and it almost always did the job.

Homepage: http:// (http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm)www.runtime.org/gdb.htm (http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm)
(http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm)

Before shelling out any money, you can download the free trial which will determine if your stuff is recoverable (if it is recoverable, you will have to buy it in order to perform the actual recovery). Be sure to read the 'How To' (link below) as you should not install this (or any other software) on the partition in question (if you overwrite the clusters you need to recover, the ball game is over)!

How To: http://www.runtime.org/datarecovery.htm (http://www.runtime.org/datarecovery.htm)

Please let me know how this works out. ~pv

[hart]

Thanks. I'll give it a try and see if it works. I already told my cousin that the disk (and all the picts) are gone. Nothing to lose now...

[hart]

I finally got everything set up for trying a recover.
Right now I've got 7,907 files to look through - and many seem to be bad - but the good thing is there are some that are still good!
This is only in one directory. I've got 1772 more to go through...
I will say right now though that the GetDataBack is worth the $
Although the disk is NTFS I had to use the FAT version to find the lost files.
Some really precious pictures are still here...
It works!

[triangle]

Actually I suppose you can restore yuor picture files. If the files are erased or the drive was formattend that doesn't always means it is impossible to restore. The tool I've used in a simmilar situation, Undelete was able to restore lost files, none of them got corrupted. I suppose that might help you too.
http://www.active-undelete.com/

[hart]

Thanks for the info. I've still got the drive. I'll try the Active-Undelete and see if it gets back any more files.
GetDataBack recovered 891 picture files (600MB), dating back to 2002.
There were other corrupted (unviewable) files, but I'm sure that was because they were truncated/overwritten by the XP installation files written to the first GB of the drive. Most of those files were just samples anyway.
I'll post the results I get from Active-Undelete.