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Well, well... It appears one of our employees kept "everything" on a USB
flash drive. And guess what? Yah, that's right. Now every time she tries
to use that drive, it says the drive isn't formatted.
I have no idea why a working drive would suddenly do this, but it sounds
quite serious. Anyway, now I have a person begging me to get their data
back for them.
So what do we think, people? Is there a hope in hell of getting this
stuff back? How would you go about it?
A quick search with Google reveals an Aladdin's cave of flashy programs
that promise to get your data back. If you pay money, anyway. Even the
ones with "FREE!" splashed all over them are actually just demo versions
that show you the files it could get back if you just pay up with real
money first. Or maybe you can only recover the first 100 files. Or only
files under 10 KB in size. Or some other arbitrary limitation to force
you to buy the full deal.
Dodgy, much?
Anyway, there are a couple of possibilities here:
- The drive is fine, and the PC is broken.
- The drive is OK, but there's a software glitch preventing Windoze from
reading it.
- The drive is physically OK, but some filesystem data got mangled.
- The drive is actually broken, but most of the data is still readable.
- The drive is toast, and it's no longer possible to read anything at all.
If it's one of the first two, my job is pretty trivial. If it's the last
one, we're going to have to pay somebody to take the drive apart and
examine it. If it's either of the middle two possibilities, I basically
need to copy everything off the drive and examine it somehow.
Copying the entire filesystem off the drive should be a simple matter
for dd. After that, does anybody have any ideas for how to reconstruct
the filesystem? (I'm presuming it's going to be FAT16... USB flash
drives usualy are, aren't they?)
There are dozens of flashy programs that claim to reconstruct
filesystems, but they all cost money. (After all, people who are too
stupid to back up there data and need it back in an emergency will pay
the Earth, right?) Surely reconstructing the broken parts of a
filesystem isn't actually *that* hard? I mean, there are absolutely
millions of data recovery programs out there, so it can't be difficult.
Has nobody written some geeky Linux utility that will do this for free?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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