Recovering data from old HD

[guest7146]

Evening all,

Earlier I found an old 400mb hard drive that had been languishing in the attic, long since forgotten.

I decided to fire it up on my PC using a USB adapter and Windows didn't recognise it.  However, when I interrogated it with WinUAE I found a bootable partition on it.  I loaded it up and, aside from a few complaints about certain bits of hardware missing, I managed to boot into workbench with no issues! :banana:

It's an old OS3.9 install of mine from 2002.  I was only 22 years old then, and it appears I was keeping a diary.  I had a good old laugh reading through my old entries; it's amazing how immature my inner thoughts were back then.  Much different now of course :crazy:
Out of interest, one of my entries talks about my purchase of a BPPC card.  Apparently I picked up a bog standard 68040 card with 160Mhz PPC for £80.  £80!!! These days you need to take a mortgage out for even the lower spec cards.

My Question:

On to my question.  One of my first diary entries talks about a hard drive crash and much lost data, including previous diary entries.  I'm quite intrigued to see if I can recover some of this data.  Can any of you lot recommend a good tool for recovering data from a deleted partition?

Cheers all!

.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I was only 22 years old then, and it appears I was keeping a diary. I had a good old laugh reading through my old entries; it's amazing how immature my inner thoughts were back then. Much different now of course :crazy:

Ha, funny story!  I've got much the same on some of my very old disks, going back to the early '90s.  That's one thing Amiga is definitely good at, making you nostalgic.  

Try perhaps DiskSalv or Quarterback Tools for recovering data?  I'm sure others will chime in with better suggestions soon.  

[guest7146]

Thanks for the suggestion!

It's also possible that I will have been using PFS3 on the drive.  If I remember PFS3 has its own recovery tools.  I'll see if I can look into that.

.

[guest7146]

Try perhaps DiskSalv or Quarterback Tools for recovering data?  I'm sure others will chime in with better suggestions soon.  

I've managed to recover some stuff using DiskSalv.  I've bagged myself an old hand-written html website that I did in 2002 (looks shameful now!) and even some of my old school work that I did on my Amiga 500!

Excellent - thanks.

[Thomas]

It's also possible that I will have been using PFS3 on the drive.  If I remember PFS3 has its own recovery tools.  I'll see if I can look into that.

No, PFS3 does not come with recovery tools, it only has repair tools. That's bad because "repair" in this context means to make the file system available again by deleting everything which is not readable any more. Once you have done this, everything which has been deleted is lost forever.

You should rather use a salvage tool which only reads from the damaged partition and copies everything found to another partition. This way you can try different tools and make multiple attempts with different options.

Try this first: http://aminet.net/package/disk/salv/pfssalv2
It's even still supported by the author: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/pfssalv2.lha