Ken wrote:
> 
> 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.

If the files are compressed your problem is much more serious then I
thought at first. I had the idea some hard work would get you a long
way, but this will need some more. I can imagine a data-recovery service
might be a little too expensive but perhaps you could put this as a nice
challenge to a programming newsgroup. First tell them you want to
retrieve images from huge binary files. They'll probably jump at that.
then tell them the files are compressed. By that time they're caught and
the _real_ byte-biters won't let go until they've found a solution.

Good luck,

Remco

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