HELP! Anyone have any experience with recovering lost data (chains/allocation units) from a disk?

[indd]

I have a friend who has a floppy disk with a lot of research data on it. He was working in two or three applications on two disks (so not saving and closing correctly, I guess) and I think it was Microsoft Word that "erased" all of his files. There are no files on the disk, and only 400-some kb free. When you do a chkdsk it comes up with about a megabyte of files in lost chains/allocation units. I know if I use chkdsk or scandisk to fix the disk it will just result in several .chk files, but I have no idea how to recover the files with these. I'm thinking the data will be there, but I just don't know how to piece them back together.

The data he had will be difficult to come by again, and so he's willing to put some money into this..

Does anyone have any experiences with recovering data in this situation? Any programs that might be able to handle this?

Otherwise, anyone have any experiences with any data recovery services?

Thanks for any help..
indd

 

[mattyrug]

May or may not help, but those .chk files can be opened up with any program. I've saved a few files from floppies (my girlfriends excel spreadsheets from work). Most of the time they're not gonna have 100% of the data there, but you can get most of it back. I usually open 'em in notepad or wordpad, and figure out what's in what file, then I'll copy and past them back into a new document.
Like I say your maileage is gonna vary, and if they're in unicode format, or even ASCII you'll have pretty good luck. just takes some time.

I don't know about other types of files, such as pictures, or audio files....

 

[indd]

mattyrug: Yeah, I've done that for text files too.. unfortunately these are binary files (like Excel spreadsheets and another graphing program called GraphPad Prism). Anyone know if something like norton disk doctor will work, or any other similar programs?

indd

 

[bruincal]

when scandisk or chkdsk recovers files, it doesn't know what the file names are, so it assigns those generic ones. if you know that the files are all docs, then you can rename the extension to .doc and usually they will open up. If they won't open up, that means that file wasn't a doc to begin with. if there are files that don't open, i think there are programs that detect what kind of file an unknown file is... scandisk should be able to recover files in whole, unless the disk was physically damaged ... in that case, its a whole other story (just as needing data recovery services)