[ILUG] Recovering drive data [OT]

[Declan Moriarty]

Was it Dale Dunlea who wrote on Wednesday 13 February 2002 11:17:
> That's what I thought too. The problem is solved now, though not in a
> very linuxy way.
>
> I brought the drive home and put it into my machine there. The
> bootloader defaults to XP and I was making a cup of tea so I wasn't in
> time to switch it to linux. I opened explorer in XP and it was able to
> read the entire "corrupted" drive.
>
> Thanks nonetheless to all who made suggestions.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Murtagh [mailto:murtaghn at tcd.ie]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 11:10 AM
> To: ilug at linux.ie
> Subject: Re: [ILUG] Recovering drive data
>
> On Wednesday 13 February 2002 09:02, Declan Moriarty wrote:
> > There are a lot of disk tools, and some are better than others.
> > Probably the best kit for fat partitions is Norton Utilities under > 
> > windoze. Linux
> > isn't much into fat, and there's a lot of versions - fat6, fat32,
> fat32x,  etc.
>
> I can remember several occasions in the bad old days using Linux to
> recover
> data from sick windows partitions. Linux has very good fat support,
> sometimes
> able to read stuff that windows can't. I'm not sure where you got the
> impression that linux "isn't much into fat". AFAIK the vfat module
> supports
> all the variations on fat (all the ones I've ever come across).

All true. And as they vary the fat32 standard, linux copes with it. Linux may 
even be faster than dos/win with fat partitions, and tools like dd can help. 
There is no equivelant to hdparm in dos/win; I am the last person who wants 
to stand up for Dos/Win, but in the area of recovery tools for fat 
partitions, I feel linux comes second place, largely because nobody in the 
linux world really bothered specially. Unerase, and even the ndd /rebuild 
which finds partitions and restores them (and the data) are hard to beat. 
There's even the ndd /undo option.

BTW, on the disk, there's a fair chance one FAT is destroyed; fat partitions 
have a copy, and you might be running on this; it's not a safe place to have 
any data until you check this out.

-- 
	Regards,


	Declan Moriarty




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