Scott Hill wrote:

> Hi Ken,
>
>         Ooops ! Now I wonder why the first three rules of computing are Backup,
> Backup and Backup !

Yeah, yeah, yeah, been there thought of that before. Damn it !

>          Anyhow, enough of my "holier than thou" attitude (hope doesn't actually
> come across that bad), you're best bet is to leave well alone, send the
> drive off to a data recovery service (they advertise in PC mags) and get
> them to recover the data. Or if you can't afford that, there are programs
> available that will extract any images it can find in any file (presumably
> they search for the image file headers), sorry no URL for one (never needed
> one) but it shouldn't be too hard find something on the web.

    Tried one. Won't work. The problem is that scandisk didn't justrename some files.
Now that would have been a chore to rename
them them, but no, it stripped the directory names out of the
drivespace drive and renamed them.What I have is 128 meg files
that contain the entire contents of directories off of the root
directory and all the subdirectories they contained. And since
these were stored with whatever compression algorithm
that drivespace uses all of the files are still compressed and
the file headers are missing. The neat thing about compression
algorithms are their ability to find a common sequence of
re-occurring character strings and reduce them to single
characters as a method to reduce the file size. This means that
nothing is guaranteed to survive until the file has become
uncompressed. Have you ever looked at a drivespace.bin file
with a text editor ?  Incomprehensible.
    Anybody know the costs of data recovery services ?

Ken Tyler

> --
> Scott Hill
> Sco### [at] DDLinkscouk
> Software Engineer (and all round nice guy)
> Author of Pandora's Box
> Company homepage : http://www.ddlinks.demon.co.uk
>
> "The best trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people he didn't
> exist..."
>                                                                 - Verbal Kint.
>
> "the Internet is here so we can waste time talking about nothing in
>  particular when we should be working" - Marcus Hill.

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