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*The problem:
I am the victim of microsofts scandisk program and have had an
entire hard drive wiped out. 20% of the files I could care less about
but the other 80% were image files and many of them irreplacable.
Over 1300 POV-Ray rendered images now lost. I don't have to
tell you people how long it would take to re-render that many scenes.
*What caused it:
While running scan disk it reported that one copy of the fat file
was not the same as the other. I have had this happen before and went
ahead and allowed it to correct the error. Upon rebooting, this was a
compressed drive, drivespace found an error and started scandisk again.
to make a long story short what I have now is the entire contents
of the compressed drive now stored as files with the name--
filechek.001 filechek.002 ect. It didn't bother seperating the files out
of the directories, Which would have made it easy to just rename the files
and use them, it instead stored the entire directories as file names.
*The solution:
This is where I need your help. Can anybody think of a way to
recover the images from the directories that have been renamed
as files. Is there any way to rename a file so the system will recognize
it as a directory instead. If I could do this then the files would become
accessable again but I have no clue how to do this.
Should I mail bomb Microsoft headquarters and just be satisfied with that ?
Please any and all help would be forever appreciated. Any image you ever
post for evaluation will get a glowing response from me. I will agree with
all the opinions you ever express in this group. Any tips, tricks, leads to
helful information, voodoo remedies, black magic, utility suggestions,
or anything else you can recommend will bring you eternal peace and my
heartfelt thanks.
Thank You for your time and patience.
Ken Tyler
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Ken wrote:
>
> *The problem:
>
> I am the victim of microsofts scandisk program and have had an
> entire hard drive wiped out. 20% of the files I could care less about
> but the other 80% were image files and many of them irreplacable.
> Over 1300 POV-Ray rendered images now lost. I don't have to
> tell you people how long it would take to re-render that many scenes.
>
> *What caused it:
>
> While running scan disk it reported that one copy of the fat file
> was not the same as the other. I have had this happen before and went
> ahead and allowed it to correct the error. Upon rebooting, this was a
> compressed drive, drivespace found an error and started scandisk
> again.
> to make a long story short what I have now is the entire contents
> of the compressed drive now stored as files with the name--
> filechek.001 filechek.002 ect. It didn't bother seperating the files
> out
> of the directories, Which would have made it easy to just rename the
> files
> and use them, it instead stored the entire directories as file names.
>
> *The solution:
>
> This is where I need your help. Can anybody think of a way to
> recover the images from the directories that have been renamed
> as files. Is there any way to rename a file so the system will
> recognize
> it as a directory instead. If I could do this then the files would
> become
> accessable again but I have no clue how to do this.
> Should I mail bomb Microsoft headquarters and just be satisfied with
> that ?
>
> Please any and all help would be forever appreciated. Any image you
> ever
> post for evaluation will get a glowing response from me. I will agree
> with
> all the opinions you ever express in this group. Any tips, tricks,
> leads to
> helful information, voodoo remedies, black magic, utility suggestions,
> or anything else you can recommend will bring you eternal peace and my
> heartfelt thanks.
>
> Thank You for your time and patience.
>
> Ken Tyler
The binary data is probably all there but your FAT has been wiped. I
guess that leaves you with just the data and renaming won't help. _If_
you would succeed in renaming the files to directories you still
wouldn't have your files back, as far as I can see.
The only thing I can think of right now is to open the binaries and see
if you can retrieve your files from there. If you know what type of
files you're looking for you could look up the file format, and search
for specific header data in the filecheck-files. Not an easy task.
Perhaps there is some sort of recovery program. Did you do a websearch
for that?
Meanwhile you have my deepest sympathy. Things like that shouldn't
happen to raytracers (I've had my occasional 'accident' too).
Good luck,
Regards,
Remco
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Did you make a recovery disk? My guess is no since I never did either.
Supposedly, if you make a recovery disk, you can undo whatever scandisk
did. It's a quite painful experience to lose you data like that. My
sympathies go out.
Ti Leggett
Ken wrote:
>
> *The problem:
>
> I am the victim of microsofts scandisk program and have had an
> entire hard drive wiped out. 20% of the files I could care less about
> but the other 80% were image files and many of them irreplacable.
> Over 1300 POV-Ray rendered images now lost. I don't have to
> tell you people how long it would take to re-render that many scenes.
>
> *What caused it:
>
> While running scan disk it reported that one copy of the fat file
> was not the same as the other. I have had this happen before and went
> ahead and allowed it to correct the error. Upon rebooting, this was a
> compressed drive, drivespace found an error and started scandisk again.
> to make a long story short what I have now is the entire contents
> of the compressed drive now stored as files with the name--
> filechek.001 filechek.002 ect. It didn't bother seperating the files out
> of the directories, Which would have made it easy to just rename the files
> and use them, it instead stored the entire directories as file names.
>
> *The solution:
>
> This is where I need your help. Can anybody think of a way to
> recover the images from the directories that have been renamed
> as files. Is there any way to rename a file so the system will recognize
> it as a directory instead. If I could do this then the files would become
> accessable again but I have no clue how to do this.
> Should I mail bomb Microsoft headquarters and just be satisfied with that ?
>
> Please any and all help would be forever appreciated. Any image you ever
> post for evaluation will get a glowing response from me. I will agree with
> all the opinions you ever express in this group. Any tips, tricks, leads to
> helful information, voodoo remedies, black magic, utility suggestions,
> or anything else you can recommend will bring you eternal peace and my
> heartfelt thanks.
>
> Thank You for your time and patience.
>
> Ken Tyler
--
The continued extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer
power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing
pointless web sites.
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What you need is a program that will search through the files and looking at the
headers and extract the files. There is a program that can do this and it will
search for the headers of various image formats amongst others. It called Ripper,
and you can get it at:
http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~til/ripper5.html
Hope this helps, and good luck.
Cheers, Matthew
Ken wrote:
>
> *The problem:
>
> I am the victim of microsofts scandisk program and have had an
> entire hard drive wiped out. 20% of the files I could care less about
> but the other 80% were image files and many of them irreplacable.
> Over 1300 POV-Ray rendered images now lost. I don't have to
> tell you people how long it would take to re-render that many scenes.
>
> *What caused it:
>
> While running scan disk it reported that one copy of the fat file
> was not the same as the other. I have had this happen before and went
> ahead and allowed it to correct the error. Upon rebooting, this was a
> compressed drive, drivespace found an error and started scandisk again.
> to make a long story short what I have now is the entire contents
> of the compressed drive now stored as files with the name--
> filechek.001 filechek.002 ect. It didn't bother seperating the files out
> of the directories, Which would have made it easy to just rename the files
> and use them, it instead stored the entire directories as file names.
>
> *The solution:
>
> This is where I need your help. Can anybody think of a way to
> recover the images from the directories that have been renamed
> as files. Is there any way to rename a file so the system will recognize
> it as a directory instead. If I could do this then the files would become
> accessable again but I have no clue how to do this.
> Should I mail bomb Microsoft headquarters and just be satisfied with that ?
>
> Please any and all help would be forever appreciated. Any image you ever
> post for evaluation will get a glowing response from me. I will agree with
> all the opinions you ever express in this group. Any tips, tricks, leads to
> helful information, voodoo remedies, black magic, utility suggestions,
> or anything else you can recommend will bring you eternal peace and my
> heartfelt thanks.
>
> Thank You for your time and patience.
>
> Ken Tyler
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Norton has some tools that could help you recover your old FAT. Other than
that, have you considered sending the HD to a data recovery company? Many
are listed in PC Magazine.
Jim
Ken wrote in message <3602F062.888CF204@pacbell.net>...
>*The problem:
>
> I am the victim of microsofts scandisk program and have had an
>entire hard drive wiped out. 20% of the files I could care less about
>but the other 80% were image files and many of them irreplacable.
>Over 1300 POV-Ray rendered images now lost. I don't have to
>tell you people how long it would take to re-render that many scenes.
>
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Jim Kress wrote:
> Norton has some tools that could help you recover your old FAT. Other than
> that, have you considered sending the HD to a data recovery company? Many
> are listed in PC Magazine.
>
> Jim
>
Monday morning when Microsoft opens it's doors they
are going to have ME on the phone waiting for them.
If that doesn't bring satisfaction I will probably mail bomb
them and them do as you suggest.
Thanks for the help.
Ken
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>Monday morning when Microsoft opens it's doors they
>are going to have ME on the phone waiting for them.
>If that doesn't bring satisfaction I will probably mail
bomb
>them and them do as you suggest.
Go get 'em!
Upon reading your sad story, I immediately decided to make a
backup of the most loved files on my hd, the pov files and
tga output, of course ;)
I guess you'll never go without a backup again either, will
you?
You have my deepest sympathy, but my knowledge of binaries
and fat's is by far insufficient to solve the problem or be
of any help to you. I'm sorry.
(Maybe this should encourage you to do some great new
rendererings, though? :)))
Good luck
Julius Klatte
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Ken <tyl### [at] pacbell net> wrote in article
<3602F062.888CF204@pacbell.net>...
> *The problem:
>
> I am the victim of microsofts scandisk program and have had an
> entire hard drive wiped out. 20% of the files I could care less about
> but the other 80% were image files and many of them irreplacable.
> Over 1300 POV-Ray rendered images now lost. I don't have to
> tell you people how long it would take to re-render that many scenes.
>
Hi Ken,
Ooops ! Now I wonder why the first three rules of computing are Backup,
Backup and Backup !
Sorry. Case of been there, done that, seen all that hard work go down the
pan just 'cos I didn't have a backup. Let it be a lesson to your self and
anyone else that doesn't use backups. If you don't backup data that you
want to keep you've only got yourself to blame when everything goes a
little pete tong and you lose all that work. You, like so many before you,
had to find out the hard way, now take what you've learnt and use it
wisely. Install backup and use it.
Oh, and if you can, don't use disk compression, you're just pilling all
your eggs into one basket doing that, so you are ! I really, really,
compounds problems like this (if you hadn't have been using disk
compression you'd have found that scandisk would probably have just screwed
up one or two files, rather than the whole lot! ).
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.
--
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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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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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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