Trixter
Veteran Member
Right before I started my sabbatical, I created a boot disk that combined a Xircom adapter and mTCP to automatically boot any vintage PC and put it on the local LAN with an FTP server so that you could suck all the data off of the hard drive. A few days later, I realized that this doesn't grab the deleted data sections, nor any filesystem slack space. So, I spent the month of October writing a utility to do just that. Results are here:
PADD
The main features are:
While I've tested it extensively with my own gear, I'd love if a few other people could test it it out and see if they encounter any bugs. There are dozens of safety checks and a few user confirmations that things are running properly, so if something is going wrong, it should be obvious. If you're worried about the utility writing to the drive, it only does that during a "freeze" operation, so simply don't use that function during testing if you get spooked.
Full docs and source code are in the .zip from the web page listed above. I look forward to any comments, even if they're negative
PADD
The main features are:
- Browse deleted data onscreen using a handy ASCII and HEX viewer
- "Freeze" all deleted areas into a file which can then be examined using normal file utilities or copied off-disk for further analysis
- Save all file "slack space" off the drive to a new file
While I've tested it extensively with my own gear, I'd love if a few other people could test it it out and see if they encounter any bugs. There are dozens of safety checks and a few user confirmations that things are running properly, so if something is going wrong, it should be obvious. If you're worried about the utility writing to the drive, it only does that during a "freeze" operation, so simply don't use that function during testing if you get spooked.
Full docs and source code are in the .zip from the web page listed above. I look forward to any comments, even if they're negative