[nycbug-talk] Fw: Recovering partition table and ntfs filesystem (intact) (on and off-topic)

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On Sep 2, 2006, at 11:34 PM, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:

> There's a whole bunch of commercial partition table recovery software:
> just google for 'partition table recovery'

don't sweat it.

in addition to the 'partition table recovery', most commercial  
vendors do some sort of 'disk scan' recovery.  software scans the  
disk bit-by-bit and trys to reassemble the filesystem ( onto an  
alternate drive )

on OSX,  the full versions of tech tool and norton utilities will do  
that.  on pc's, i've had luck with 'data recovery pro' or 'easy  
recovery pro'.  can't remember the right name.

if any of the open source tools work, awesome -- let me know .

in any event, my 2 bits of advice are as follows:

	plan on time: the recovery process can take up to 2 days: as much as  
1 day to find the files, and as much as 1 day to copy.  sometimes  
you're not so lucky on the first recovery read, and need to try  
again.  its taken me a week to recover some volumes.
	buy a new drive, and set whatever app to write to that and treat the  
data drive as read only.  early windows apps would often screw that  
up and write onto the data you tried to recover.  having a new spare  
drive around is always good anyways.  you can have a dupe of your  
files should this happen again.