I'm afraid that's a little bit late, but did you try to read the hard disk
blocks by a direct call to low level IO functions, starting at the block
where youre file starts (if, as I understood the file exists but is empty),
if you're lucky only the firsts bytes are gone.

Hope WE don't lose thi great image

Philippe

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Ph Gibone wrote:
> 
> I'm afraid that's a little bit late, but did you try to read the hard disk
> blocks by a direct call to low level IO functions, starting at the block
> where youre file starts (if, as I understood the file exists but is empty),

Could you be more specific (simplistic)? Windoze has nuked my files in this
manner before; what tools would you use to read the contents of individual
blocks?

Margus

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norton utilites (Norton Disc Doctor)


-- 
//Spider 
( spi### [at] bahnhofse ) [ http://www.bahnhof.se/~spider/ ]
#declare life = rand(seed(42))*sqrt(-1);

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>Could you be more specific (simplistic)? Windoze has nuked my files in this
>manner before; what tools would you use to read the contents of individual
>blocks?
>
>Margus

There exists some commercial tools for that (Norton sells one certainly),
but you can use DEBUG which is a DOS command that you find on your disk : it
is not an easy one (its just like writing assembly code) and you have to
know the adress of your file first. Honestly I haven't done this since years
(I used PCTOOLS at that time)

Philippe

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Ph Gibone wrote:
> 
> >Could you be more specific (simplistic)? Windoze has nuked my files in this
> >manner before; what tools would you use to read the contents of individual
> >blocks?
> >
> >Margus
> 
> There exists some commercial tools for that (Norton sells one certainly),
> but you can use DEBUG which is a DOS command that you find on your disk : it
> is not an easy one (its just like writing assembly code) and you have to
> know the adress of your file first. Honestly I haven't done this since years
> (I used PCTOOLS at that time)
> 
> Philippe

  I used to use Norton utilities for this myself but that was when HD's
were only 10 - 20 megs and looking at the entire contents of the drive
were easy to visualy search through. At 1 gig or more that possibility has
long since passed away as an option. I don't have that much time on my
hands.

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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Hmm, I remember the few times I've rewritten my FAT and MBR with a hex-editor..
those were the days... *laugh*

Ken wrote:
> 
> Ph Gibone wrote:
> >
> > >Could you be more specific (simplistic)? Windoze has nuked my files in this
> > >manner before; what tools would you use to read the contents of individual
> > >blocks?
> > >
> > >Margus
> >
> > There exists some commercial tools for that (Norton sells one certainly),
> > but you can use DEBUG which is a DOS command that you find on your disk : it
> > is not an easy one (its just like writing assembly code) and you have to
> > know the adress of your file first. Honestly I haven't done this since years
> > (I used PCTOOLS at that time)
> >
> > Philippe
> 
>   I used to use Norton utilities for this myself but that was when HD's
> were only 10 - 20 megs and looking at the entire contents of the drive
> were easy to visualy search through. At 1 gig or more that possibility has
> long since passed away as an option. I don't have that much time on my
> hands.
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler
> 
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

-- 
//Spider
        [ spi### [at] bahnhofse ]-[ http://www.bahnhof.se/~spider/ ]
What I can do and what I could do, I just don't know anymore
                "Marian"
        By: "Sisters Of Mercy"

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Really nice horse, it's a shame you've lost the code.  Presumably you'r
not using 95 or NT, or you could try a find containing text from the
tools menu in Explorer, and search for the name of an object that you
remember from that particular file.  You never know where windows puts
files.

Steve

Ken wrote:
> 
> It was in the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless evening, in the autumn
>  of the year, the sky overcast threatening rain, and the wretched cold penetrating
>  to the very core of my body, that I happened upon the ill fated house of Beauty...
> 
>    This is an image of a scene I have been working on 3 day's now for my sisters
>  birthday. I got the scene to this stage and saved it as a jpg for reference
>  purposes. I made a couple of changes and added a bunch of spheres to make a
>  string like water curtain effect around the statue.
>     I must have been a little over enthusiastic with the ambient values for the
>  spheres and their number. I already had the 72 colored spotlights highlighting
>  the ceiling and the light buffers started consuming enormous amounts of memory.
>     After rendering for 15 min. my hard drive started groaning and thrashing
>  in an unatural way. Concerned I stopped the render using the windows task manager  
 because Pov
> had stopped responding. When I restarted Pov the file and all of it's
>  contents were gone. This will remain an unfinished and unreproducable work -
>  a fatal beauty if you will.
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler
> 
> mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net
> 
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  [Image]

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Steve wrote:
> 
> Really nice horse, it's a shame you've lost the code.  Presumably you'r
> not using 95 or NT, or you could try a find containing text from the
> tools menu in Explorer, and search for the name of an object that you
> remember from that particular file.  You never know where windows puts
> files.
> 
> Steve

  I am running win 98. The problem is I'm pretty sure where Windows put the
file and that's never never land or commonly called the zero byte file.

 I still have the horse by the way. It is the loss of all of the Pov script
that I am lamenting. I had nearly 350 lines of hand typed and positioned
objects, textures and lights. My memory's pretty good but not that good.

SIGH !

-- 
Ken Tyler

mailto://tylereng@pacbell.net

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