Best current recovery program?

[Liqourice]

Something happened to one partition yesterday and it got uninitialized for some reason. No big deal since it was my download/trash partition but still, I've tried to get everything back because it's good to know howto if something similar happens to a more valuable partition.

Just to mention, it's an old 200GB Seagate HDD IDE in my A4000.

I tried Quarterback Tools and after scan it found a LOT of files but when I want to recover them I get a message that says "no valid bitmap" on the target partition and nothing more happens. I guess it's just to old to handle FFS Intl?

I've tried Disksalv Unformat and it finds a lot of files as well but then it does nothing more. Either I'm doing something wrong or it can't handle what happened.

Is there a more modern and better tool these days for this?

[thomas]

I guess your best bet is the new DiskDoctor which comes with OS 3.2. Everything else is not able to reliably handle harddrives >4GB.

[Liqourice]

Originally Posted by thomas

I guess your best bet is the new DiskDoctor which comes with OS 3.2. Everything else is not able to reliably handle harddrives >4GB.

Well, I don't have 3.2 yet. Gonna get it in a few weeks but that doesn't help me now.

[daxb]

The best/easiest way to recover data is to have a working backup. A recovery program need to be compatible to the filesystem. So you need to find one that fits. Usually they are not cross compatible. The OS 3.2 releases include Diskdoctor for FFS. PFS and SFS come with its own old (not) working tools.

[Liqourice]

Originally Posted by daxb

The best/easiest way to recover data is to have a working backup. A recovery program need to be compatible to the filesystem. So you need to find one that fits. Usually they are not cross compatible. The OS 3.2 releases include Diskdoctor for FFS. PFS and SFS come with its own old (not) working tools.

I know that, and I do make backups frequently. As I mentioned, this is no real problem since there's no valuable data on the partition, I just want to try and recover to learn.


Even with regular backups there's always a risk of losing stuff between backups. Hence it is a good idea to know how to recover if that happens.