[NTLUG:Discuss] NTLUG:Discuss] Data recovery - SOLVED

[Fred]

For those who followed my Help thread, here is the result:

disktest/photorec

I used disktest/photorec to recover a damaged 320GB drive
and put the results on a 1TB drive. The results were not exactly
what I had expected, although if I had understood what I was reading 
I wouldn't have been surprised. Seems like photorec is a truly
forensic recovery program, in that it ignores any volume table of
contents and pulls contiguous data off the damaged drive and puts
that data onto the destination. I had movie files 8GB long with
pieces of 2 or 3 or more movies... as long as the file was determined
to be the same type (mpg or whatever) and was contiguous, it got
stored into the destination file. Fragmented files were saved as separate 
files if they weren't like the above. Once a directory had 500 entries, a
new one was created. Etc. So, it recovered the data but left me with
a 2 year project of pasting the shredded output back together.

Recover Data for Linux

Ok, so after seeing that I had the equivalent to a paper shredder that 
needed to be pasted together, I said something that rhymed with truck it
and popped the $45 for Recover Data. It went through and read the VTOC 
(or whatever Linux/EXT3 uses) and then slicker'n snot proceeded to recover
all the files and directories over to a directory tree on the spare drive. I
started it before bedtime and it was done when I checked it this morning.
All I had to do was change the file permissions. Everything seems to
be as it is supposed to be. No video dropouts, the user backups are there,
etc. 

Summary

I am batting .333 on buying software, since this is the first of 3 that has
actually been worth a damn. I recommend it. I suppose that if the drive
had been any more damaged than it was, the second stage recovery effort
from Recover Data would have given about the same results as photorec,
but it wasn't so I got great results. As for the 320GB drive... if I were a true
engineer, I would reformat it and check it for bad sectors and try to determine
exactly what happened. Fortunately for me, I am not, so since it is about
the right size to test my .308's grouping at 500 yds, that is what I will do.

I might even post the results of that as a jpg.

Thanks again to all who helped.

Fred