• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

recovery for deleted files in 286 dos 3.30?

M

musicforlife

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 10, 2018
Messages
255
Location
Finland
Damn it, I can't find any free programs to do file recovery under 286 dos computer. At best free programs require 386 or better. The computer is using DOS 3.30. Please help.
 
Yeah, it only said that it can't recover the folder while with modern program I could browse individual files but that was the demo version which only allows to browse recoverable files but doesn't do anything.
 
Have you tried the FreeDOS undelete? It was supposed to have been compiled for the 8086.

I remember there being a number of undelete utilities provided in programming magazines but I can't locate any download site except for the PC Magazine implementation designed for DOS 2. Most of these are very simple so might not yield the results you want.

Norton Utilities 4.5 is one of the better tool sets that can run on DOS 3.3 and will run on a 286. If it can't recover the data, either through undeletion or direct reading of sectors, very little else available for DOS will.

Could you describe the problem you are having in more detail? It may be that the solutions suggested may not be useful due to a misunderstanding.
 
We used Norton Utilities 4.5 as mentioned above back then. Any undelete tool should work the same though.
If you write to the disk after deleting the files, you may overwrite sections of the disk that were used for that file. So don't install software on to it, always run it from floppy.
I wonder if that's why it said it couldn't recover the files?
 
I never use free recovery software for DOS but I think the free software for windows like Recuva, Stellar Data Recovery Free Edition, TestDisk etc. recover the deleted data efficiently. Stellar has option of bootable recovery drive, probably you can try make a drive bootable and connect it to your doc pc and run the program who knows it may work in your case. Thanks
 
krebizfan said:
Have you tried the FreeDOS undelete? It was supposed to have been compiled for the 8086.

I remember there being a number of undelete utilities provided in programming magazines but I can't locate any download site except for the PC Magazine implementation designed for DOS 2. Most of these are very simple so might not yield the results you want.

Norton Utilities 4.5 is one of the better tool sets that can run on DOS 3.3 and will run on a 286. If it can't recover the data, either through undeletion or direct reading of sectors, very little else available for DOS will.

Could you describe the problem you are having in more detail? It may be that the solutions suggested may not be useful due to a misunderstanding.
Click to expand...


What happened was this: I was taking backups from old '86 286 computer's original content for "historic value". The hard drive has a lot of bad sectors but managed to get most of it. When using copy command for one program's files, it had once the "can't read the sector" error but after one or two retries it continued and finished. However when I tested the program it complained about missing data files. I assumed one of the files was somehow corrupted.

I took second time copy and this time I used xcopy command instead. Again there was same error but continued after first retry and this time this program worked when I tested it on my second computer. However I managed somehow to mix up the disks and rewrote the "good copy" of the program while the bad one was on the backups and other disk. I didn't realize this soon enough that after backing up everything possible, I tested writing few files into hard drive and then did "chkdsk" command which ended up clearing entire hard drive.

I tested with "active uneraser" program that it could still find the files but because it was demo version it doesn't allow recovering anything. Norton 4.5 said the folder was broken and unrecoverable.
 
I don't know why chkdsk seemed to erase the hard drive but now it seems normal again. I mean after chkdsk it was seemingly "empty".

Anyway, last time I used norton's unerase as separately from command line but now when I try the main program, every time it gives me only "error reading FAT" on drive C.
 
If you're using NU 4.5 follow this procedure to try to recover the deleted files:

1) run UD (UnRemove Directory) to recover the deleted directory (by default it tries to recover all deleted directories)
2) CD to the recovered directory in step 1
3) QU (Quick Unerase) to recover the deleted files (by default it tries to recover all deleted files)

Very important: avoid to write anything to disk until you recover the files.

Hope this helps.
 
dieymir said:
If you're using NU 4.5 follow this procedure to try to recover the deleted files:

1) run UD (UnRemove Directory) to recover the deleted directory (by default it tries to recover all deleted directories)
2) CD to the recovered directory in step 1
3) QU (Quick Unerase) to recover the deleted files (by default it tries to recover all deleted files)

Very important: avoid to write anything to disk until you recover the files.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...


It says the same that "directory data has been damaged" and cannot be recovered.
 
If the directory happens to be in a bad sector, there is very little that can be done easily. Since the directory was also deleted which suggests its contents were deleted, then there aren't allocation chains in the FAT to at least allow recovering the parts of files shown by the chains.

What is left? Hard work. Disk Edit or a similar tool would allow one to look at every unused sector and if it contained valuable information, copy it to a different drive for safe keeping. If the directory contained text files, it might be possible to recover much of the text and then stitch the text back into a reasonable facsimile of the original files.
 
I'm sorry to say but you are probably hosed. You just learned the hard way never, ever use a disk repair tool (chkdsk, scandisk, fsck, etc.) in a data recovery situation
 
As a last resort you can attach the disk to a more current computer with Linux installed or booted from a live distro and then use ddrescue (https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html) to make an image of the whole disk. After that, you can use testdisk and/or photorec to try to recover data using that image instead of the original disk.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Just my two cents, *never* touch the original media when you want to recover any data from it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top