File Recovery on an iMac

[Mike Morgan]

My 92 year old mother accidentally deleted a large no. of important
files on her iMac. She just has the bulit-in CD player. No floppy or CD
burner. I am looking at getting Symantec's Norton Utilities 8.0 for
Mac. I have done file recoveries many years ago on a PowerMac and recall
that after you boot from the CD you had to write the recovered files to
a floppy. Is that still the case or can you save the files to the iMac
HD?

Thanks,

Mike
Please reply to michaelm at power.net

[George Williams]

Mike Morgan wrote:
>
> Is that still the case or can you save the files to the iMac
> HD?

Save them back to the HD. They advise against it when
the HD is damaged.

[Ludovic Hirlimann]

Mike Morgan <mich...@power.net> wrote:

> My 92 year old mother accidentally deleted a large no. of important
> files on her iMac. She just has the bulit-in CD player. No floppy or CD
> burner. I am looking at getting Symantec's Norton Utilities 8.0 for
> Mac. I have done file recoveries many years ago on a PowerMac and recall
> that after you boot from the CD you had to write the recovered files to
> a floppy. Is that still the case or can you save the files to the iMac
> HD?

No floppies needed ... If it does not work take a look at other tools
available, like tech tools pro or disk doctor X

--
http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/

[Jerry Stratton]

In article <dqadnWN6uMk...@adelphia.com>,
Mike Morgan <mich...@power.net> wrote:

> My 92 year old mother accidentally deleted a large no. of important
> files on her iMac. She just has the bulit-in CD player. No floppy or CD
> burner. I am looking at getting Symantec's Norton Utilities 8.0 for
> Mac. I have done file recoveries many years ago on a PowerMac and recall
> that after you boot from the CD you had to write the recovered files to
> a floppy. Is that still the case or can you save the files to the iMac
> HD?

The reason you "have to" write the files to a floppy if you are
*recovering* them is that you are creating new files based on pieces of
possibly deleted files. The operating system itself will be perfectly
happy to create those new files on top of some of the files you're
trying to recover, because as far as the operating system is concerned
it's all free space.

So unless you're right the very first time, you run the risk of writing
over some of the data you want to recover. This is the case on any
operating system. So you have never been *required*, as far as I know,
to use a floppy or other separate file system when recovering files, it
has always been strongly recommended.

This is also why you want to boot from the CD: the operating system
writes to the disk as a natural course of running. If you boot from the
hard drive, there is a (lesser) risk that the OS will write some of its
own data on top of the now empty space.

If all you are doing is undeleting a file, there's no need for a
separate filesystem, because all you're doing is changing or creating a
directory entry for the file, and not moving any data around.

But if you are actually recovering files from pieces of data, while you
don't *need* to recover to a separate filesystem (such as a floppy), you
really, really, want to.

If she has an iMac, it probably has FireWire and definitely has USB. If
you have any sort of FireWire hard drive or USB hard drive, or USB
keychain, or iPod, or anything that can be mounted as a drive on her
Mac, you can use that instead of a floppy or CD-RW.

Jerry

--
It Isn't Murder If They're Yankees
http://www.ItIsntMurder.com/