Re: [Bug-ddrescue] ddrescue 1.3 - questions from a newbie

[DePriest, Jason R.]

On 1/25/07, Matt Boge  wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I don't want to be a pest, but if there is any chance someone could take a few 
> minutes and look at my questions below, I would definitely appreciate it.  
> Again, I really appreciate what you have all done already, but I'm kinda dead 
> in the water right now and I'm a little anxious about moving forward on my own.
>
> I have been checking out the rescued data using Knoppix, and while a lot of 
> data was saved, I noticed a huge glaring hole:  the My Pictures folder was 
> missing.  As you can probably imagine, this is one of the few folders I really 
> cared about rescuing and while I was expecting that some of the data might be 
> lost, I certainly wasn't expecting the entire folder to not show up.
>
> Anyway, I think I'd like to give SpinRite a shot on the damaged drive to see if I can eek 
> out anymore data, but before I do (and possibly damage the drive further), I want to be 
> sure that the stuff I did pull off already with ddrescue is safe.  In that vein, I want 
> to have two copies of the rescued data: one scratch drive (to add any potential new data 
> saved by SpinRite and updated by a second running of ddrescue) and one "safe" 
> copy that I can revert to if my scratch drive fiddlings go bad.
>
> Thanks for the time you have put in already, and I will certainly understand if 
> you don't have the time to help me some more.  Either way, I will post follow 
> up emails to update the progress... if nothing more than to bring closure to 
> the thread.
>
>  - Matt

I can't tell you how to do anything with this in ddrescue.

That said, I am personally familiar with two Windows tools that can
find "orphaned" or "lost" files.

Basically, they look through the raw data on the drive and when they
find something that looks like it should be a file, but there is no
reference to it, it will give it some name like 0000000001.jpg and let
you recover it wherever you want.

So, your pictures or at least some of them are probably still there
even if the folder they used to be in is gone.

I use ActiveFile Recovery Pro and Recover My Files for this sort of thing.

Both are non-free Windows programs.

-Jason