[Thinkpad] Lost file problem W2K

[mje at foxall.com.au]

[Jeff Race:]

>The data are on a separate partition.

     That's very good.  If you can be totally sure nothing has changed there
since the mishap, I would be pretty optimistic about getting the files back.


>Norton Unerase did an automatic recovery of files
>is stores in a special recycle bin.  They didn't
>all come back,

     None of my previous suggestions were taking this into account, but just
referring to the actual original copy of the data on the disk.  But if you were
using a recycle bin, I wonder why it didn't work for *all* the files.  Perhaps
it is limited to so many megabytes, and ran out of space to allow for the job.


>but the ones back are just fine
>(there are about 8,000 files back; I'm missing
>another 10-15 thousand).   Basically these were
>all my e-mails saved over the past decade.

     Ouch - that is bad.  I hope you manage to get it all back.  I don't know if
my suggestions were any good or not - and if I said anything incorrect, maybe
others here will correct me.  But my own experience at least does back up what I
told you.
     I can imagine how you feel about this, and if I can help, I'm willing to
try further to do so.  But I may be near the limit of the number of suggestions
I can make without seeing the situation for myself.


>Some folders didn't reappear at all.

     When you talk about folders, do you mean within your e-mail program, or
subdirectories that can be changed to from the command-line?  If you mean the
latter, then those would have to be recovered first before you can unerase the
files within them.
     Norton can do that, too.  Indeed, older MS-DOS versions of Norton had a
series of automatic utilities for various tasks as well as the main utility for
manually recovering data.  One was for unerasing files, and another for
recovering deleted subdirectories.  I never really trusted the one for
recovering files, especially long ones, for the reasons I mentioned before for
finding automatic unerasing of files unreliable; but the one for recovering
subdirectories seemed to work quite well (but not infallibly).  This utility
would hunt for disk clusters which looked as if they might belong to a
subdirectory, and actually display the contents in readable form and ask you to
include it or exclude it from the reconstructed directory.
     However, I believe the main (manual) utility can restore subdirectories as
well as files, provided the relevant data are still there.  (I say "I believe"
because I haven't used this for a while, and I don't quite recall for sure.)
     I believe that there is no argument for automatic unerasing of files if you
know how to do it manually, except in the case of files only one cluster long,
where no errors can take place in allocating the unerased space to the file. 
(The file's entry in the subdirectory contains the actual number of the first
cluster in the file, so that infallibly belongs to it.)


>The data should be there.

     Then I think the prognosis for recovering the files *fully* should be 100
percent, provided you know how to do it manually, or can get an expert to do so,
and provided they are in a human-readable form so that you can tell correct from
incorrect data visually.  It may take many, many hours to do so, though,
depending on various factors.


>I need recs for a tried and true utility.

     Well, Norton Utilities (in various versions) is the only one I've ever
used.  I suppose there are others, though, and I suppose they work in roughly
similar ways.  I actually trust older, MS-DOS versions of Norton more than I do
Windows versions, which I seem to recall behaving oddly at times, in a way I
feel rather uneasy about.  I have used both old and new versions successfully,
though.
     But be aware that MS-DOS versions won't allow for long file-names, and will
probably lose them.  So for example, a file called "ThinkPadEmail.mbx" might end
up being called "ThinkP~1.mbx", using the standard convention for abbreviating
file-names to fit within MS-DOS file-name length limitations.

                         Regards,
                          Michael Edwards.



-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/