Desperate Plea - File System Expert Needed

Forum thread started by AMSmith42 on Wed, 2008-02-20 23:49

Short Story: I have pictures on a unmountable partition that I want recovered.

Long Story (to the best of my recollection): Way back when I only owned one decent size hard drive, I was configuring my computer to dual boot with BeOS 5 and Windows 98. I played a tricky game of partition leap frog with my data and lost. I was trying to create partitions with fdisk and keep my documents from Windows intact. I was almost done.

I had BeOS installed on the upper part of the drive and empty space and the partition with the files in the lower and middle parts respectively. I copied my files into the BeOS partition and then booted into DOS to use fdisk and delete the files partition and merge it with the empty space to get a FAT32 partition in which to install Windows 98. Everything worked up until this point.

When I went to boot into BeOS, it was gone. The nearest I could tell, fdisk put the end of the FAT32 partition after the beginning of the BeOS partition. But by this time, it was too late as I had formated the FAT32 partition and any BeOS data that resided there was gone.

I would appreciate anyone's *expert* help on this. I can send you the drive if you feel up to the challenge. I can even work out monetary compensation, but I would like someone to give it a whole-hearted effort to retrieve the lost pictures on the partition. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Adam Smith

‹ Hello to All Hello from Haiku (USB boot) ›

Comments

Re: Desperate Plea - File System Expert Needed

by John Ariola - 2008-06-12 15:07

I dunno if this helps as this post is OLD, anyways, there is an open-source program I used called testdisk -or- photorec which scans a disk for files even if it was formatted, the bad thing about it is, you'd have to have a hard disk with free space bigger than the one you're scanning because it places the files in the same directory as you ran the program in and it *tries* and will recover all recoverable files, you might exhaust your hard disk space. (okay if you overwrote that part of the disk, I don't think it can recover it) I don't exactly know how this program works but I surmise it scans for media headers in a partition regardless of any recoverable FAT tables, reads in the header calculates the size of the image/media and then saves it into the working directory. At least that's what I would do if I were a programmer. Hope this helps.

Re: Desperate Plea - File System Expert Needed

by AMSmith42 - 2008-06-12 23:08

Thank you very much for the reply. I still monitor this post because I very much want to resolve this.

Unfortunately, the files I am looking for reside on a BFS-formatted partition, not a FAT partition. I would love to have a program that works as you describe for the BeOS/Haiku. Hard drive space is not a problem. The only problem I have is that the partition is unmountable.

Thanks again for the reply.

Re: Desperate Plea - File System Expert Needed

by umccullough - 2008-06-12 23:19

Have you tried these?

http://bebits.com/app/2788

They should be runnable on unmountable partitions I think...

FWIW, I have a toast BFS partition myself, last time I tried the BFS tools, the machine hung after a few hours, and I've since discovered it has some bad RAM (could be why the disk got corrupted). I plan to try them again soon.

Re: Desperate Plea - File System Expert Needed

by AMSmith42 - 2008-06-14 16:23

Those look promising. I will look into it. Thank you much!