Had a bit of trouble today: one of Vickie's two-gig thumb drives went catatonic. All Windows could come up with was the scary message that the disk in drive E wasn't formatted, and did she want to format it now? (Answer: nooooooo!) After a bit of investigation--the usual stuff: reboot, pray, try it on several machines, sacrifice a chicken--we came to the conclusion that the thing's file system had broken.
So, armed with foggy memories of how Norton Utilities used to work, off I went into the wilds of the Net, searching for recovery advice. Mostly I found questionable stuff; there are many operators out there who will charge you hundreds of dollars to take a crack at your data with no guarantees, and there are plenty of freeware/shareware downloads that claim to recover lost files but were last updated in 1997, and have since been turned into those $49.95 bloatware packages you see at Office Depot. Most of these are about hard drives or floppy disks, not memory sticks; I tried a half-dozen, but got nothing back from Vickie's poor dead baby.
Finally I found Christophe Grenier's TestDisk/PhotoRec suite, at http://cgsecurity.org. PhotoRec ignores the file system in favor of finding lost files, so it works on FAT, NTFS, EXT2/EXT3, HFS, and (with certain caveats) ReiserFS. And since it's looking for known file headers and using data carving techniques, more than eighty file types--among them DOC, PDF, and PPT--are instantly recoverable. Here's how it went:
* I downloaded the ZIP file, extracted it to my desktop--no installation required, awesome!--and fired up PhotoRec. After smiling at the text-only interface, I hit the down-arrow to highlight the drive--in my case it was /dev/sdb--and hit Enter to continue.
* Next I needed to choose the partition table type. Not knowing what else to do, I chose Intel, since the last time the thing had run successfully was on a Windows machine. (I'm guessing this would want to be set to Macintosh if one was attempting recovery from a Mac-formatted iPod.)
* The next screen showed an empty partition and a FAT16 partition, both of which took up pretty much the entire disk. I crossed my fingers and hit Enter again, choosing the empty partition.
* Next, it asked me to choose my filesystem; I was pretty sure we weren't looking at an EXT2/EXT3 system, so I hit Enter to accept Other, the highlighted default.
* Finally it asked for a location to store recovered data; I went again with the default, which creates a new directory wherever you have the program installed. And we were off and running; the first file to pop up was a PDF, and since my new directory showed thumbnails by default, I could see that everything was going to be okay. Four minutes later, we were all done; all Vickie had to do was re-create her directory structure, re-name her files, and figure out which belonged where.
Many thanks, Christophe; you ought to be receiving one of your US Amazon wish-list items from us shortly.
Credits:kentbrewster.com