Lost & Found Help

[zafonica]

I have posted previously regarding my lost file partitions and as a last resort tried lost and found. Surprisingly it has recovered some word docs (renamed 001, 002,003 etc) but also some that it has tagged as ole files and which I cannot open. Does anyone know how to work this software so that it recovers exe, mpg files etc ?

Any help as always appreciated


Cheers


David

[Dave_H]

Great news that your able to read some data off your drive David.
What are you using to recover the data to?
The reason I ask is that I think files that have been changed into a numbered extention like file.001, are part of a compressed set.
(I'm hoping your not having to resort to restoring file by file onto floppies).
To restore those files, you need to put the media into a working system and inside Windows, run the "renew" utility on them.

If your using a second hard drive to recieve the data, it may be easier to restore a whole bunch of folders at once and not choose the option to compress. That way you will skip the compression and conversion process.
Either way you choose, you will need to run the "refresh" utility, and point it at the "longfilename.bat" file in order to restore all the long filenames.

Looks like your making good progress. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif
Dave

[zafonica]

Thanks for the info Dave. When using L&F it identified a number of folders icluding one called LOSTFAT. However when I tried to recover files in this folder they are coming back as unknown file types (ie no extension). The files recovered from LOSTFILE folder are coming back alright apart from those that it has given an .ole extension. I know what ole stands for but cannot understand why they are being given that extenson is there any product that can identify a file type by its hexidecimal values or any other means. If I can identify the proper extension I may be able to get some of the more important data back.

As always your help is appreciated


Cheers


David

[Dave_H]

This may explain whats happening with the file extentions. This is from page 31 of the manual.
Lost FAT Chains
Some viruses and directory corruption lead to files that exist entirely in a lost FAT chain.
Lost & Found can analyze lost FAT chains and attempt to recreate files that may have
existed in them.
After the disk has been analyzed, files that exist in lostFAT chains are included in the
LOSTFILE directory under the Lost & Found section for the partition on which the files
existed. The files may not have their old filenames but will have a file extension indicating
the file type as closely as Lost & Found can predict it. You may wish to recover files that
are close to the right size of the files you are trying to recover, then open them and see
what they are.You may need to recover several files and put them together to restore the
original lost file.
Sorry thats not much help in finding what types of extentions the original files were.
I'm sure your trying notepad on them to see if there documents, but I have no idea of identifying other file types by viewing them thru a hex exitor.
I'll keep digging around David,
Dave

[zafonica]

Dave, thanks for your last post I will let you know if I find any way of identifying these files.

Cheers

David