Short Story: I have pictures on a unmountable partition that I want recovered.
Long Story (to the best of my recollection): Way back when I only owned one decent size hard drive, I was configuring my computer to dual boot with BeOS 5 and Windows 98. I played a tricky game of partition leap frog with my data and lost. I was trying to create partitions with fdisk and keep my documents from Windows intact. I was almost done.
I had BeOS installed on the upper part of the drive and empty space and the partition with the files in the lower and middle parts respectively. I copied my files into the BeOS partition and then booted into DOS to use fdisk and delete the files partition and merge it with the empty space to get a FAT32 partition in which to install Windows 98. Everything worked up until this point.
When I went to boot into BeOS, it was gone. The nearest I could tell, fdisk put the end of the FAT32 partition after the beginning of the BeOS partition. But by this time, it was too late as I had formated the FAT32 partition and any BeOS data that resided there was gone.
I would appreciate anyone’s expert help on this. I can send you the drive if you feel up to the challenge. I can even work out monetary compensation, but I would like someone to give it a whole-hearted effort to retrieve the lost pictures on the partition. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Adam Smith
I dunno if this helps as this post is OLD, anyways, there is an open-source program I used called testdisk -or- photorec which scans a disk for files even if it was formatted, the bad thing about it is, you’d have to have a hard disk with free space bigger than the one you’re scanning because it places the files in the same directory as you ran the program in and it tries and will recover all recoverable files, you might exhaust your hard disk space. (okay if you overwrote that part of the disk, I don’t think it can recover it) I don’t exactly know how this program works but I surmise it scans for media headers in a partition regardless of any recoverable FAT tables, reads in the header calculates the size of the image/media and then saves it into the working directory. At least that’s what I would do if I were a programmer. Hope this helps.
Thank you very much for the reply. I still monitor this post because I very much want to resolve this.
Unfortunately, the files I am looking for reside on a BFS-formatted partition, not a FAT partition. I would love to have a program that works as you describe for the BeOS/Haiku. Hard drive space is not a problem. The only problem I have is that the partition is unmountable.
Thanks again for the reply.
Have you tried these?
http://bebits.com/app/2788
They should be runnable on unmountable partitions I think…
FWIW, I have a toast BFS partition myself, last time I tried the BFS tools, the machine hung after a few hours, and I’ve since discovered it has some bad RAM (could be why the disk got corrupted). I plan to try them again soon.
Those look promising. I will look into it. Thank you much!