Recovering deleted, fragmented files?

[DALE GARY]

We have a problem. Many CAD drawings were accidentally deleted in MSDOS 6.2,
and UNDELETE could not recover them all. We did not have DELETE SENTRY
or DELETE TRACKER running. We did not use the disk at all after making
the error, so we suspect the problem with recovery is that the files were
not stored contiguously on the disk. We also tried Norton Utilities to
undelete the files, with little luck (2 additional files were recovered
but were unusable in Generic CAD).

We desperately need these files. Is there any utility that can recover
fragmented files from deletion? Are there companies that specialize in
miracles that someone can recommend in the southern California area?
Any help will be appreciated. Please send email to Anna Mulhern
(amul...@iago.caltech.edu) or reply to this message. Thanks!

Dale Gary

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Dale E. Gary | d...@sundog.caltech.edu
Solar Astronomy 264-33 |
Caltech |
Pasadena, CA 91125 |
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[Frank Slootweg]

I can not help you with your undelete problem, but, before doing
anything else, I strongly advise you to get a copy of RAWDISK.SYS (see
below for details) and use it to make an image backup of your disk. In
that way you can always go back, when you try an operation which only
make things worse instead of better.

Frank

L.S.,

Attached please find some information on Juergen Prang's driver
RAWDISK.SYS.

Best regards,

Frank Slootweg, fra...@hpuamsa.neth.hp.com

Contents of README file for RAWDISK.SYS :
=========================================

RAWDISK.SYS is a DOS device driver, that maps an arbitrary
portion of a harddisk (given by a start- and endcylinder) onto a
logical DOS drive. The HD area is accessed (read or written)
through a regular DOS file. Logical drive administration areas
(bootsector, FAT and rootdirectory) are totally virtual, hence
no additional HD space is required.

The primary intention for this device driver is to get logical
access to harddisks and partitions foreign to DOS, to enable the
usage of any QIC-80 streamer and its DOS based backup software
for making image backups of this HD area. The general approach
of this driver, however, makes it possible to use almost any
useful DOS utilities to manipulate the HD area.

I recommend reading the documentation carefully. This is
especially true, if you use this driver with a DOS version other
than MS-DOS 5.0 or with a partitioned disk or with a disk that
has more than 1024 cylinders or 63 sectors or 16 heads, because
it is easy to destroy the contents of the whole disk using this
driver. The driver requires partitions laying on cylinder
boundaries.

Author information for RAWDISK.SYS :
====================================

Juergen Prang (pr...@du9ds4.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de)
University of Duisburg, Germany
Department of Dataprocessing

How/where to get RAWDISK.SYS :
==============================

RAWDISK.SYS is available via FTP from :

ftp.uni-duisburg.de: /pub/pc/misc/rawdsk11.zip
login:anonymous, password: e-mail address.