I’m thinking about trying to recover some xrns files from a (quick) formatted hard drive; I’m assuming the data is all still there since it should have only written over the partition table… Problem is I can’t find anything other than hex editors to trawl through the raw data unless I’m willing to fork out some dough for it; I’m wondering if anyone here has any idea of some start/end of xrns data strings in raw hex, so I can search through and try and piece together some strings. The thing on my side is that the files were recently transferred to the drive in bulk and not modified, so the files shouldn’t be fragmented at all; if I can find a reliable string to search for each start and end of file I think I have a pretty good chance at getting alot of it back.
Any ideas welcome, this is my entire working history of music creation I’m referring to…
Since XRNS files are ZIP files they aren’t that easy to distinguish in raw hex. You’re looking to recover ZIP files actually. Your best bet is looking for a programmers documentation on the ZIP header to find out it’s “magic string” and where in the header after it the filesize might be stored.
Before going through such trouble i’d rather give TestDisk a try, had some good results using it for some friends.
If you only just transferred them across where’s the other hard drive?
I would of personally put this in the Help section.
I just searched another forum I use and a few people recommend this. ONly works if you haven’t written over the files (which you say you haven’t) and sounds like it should let you see the actual files.
Testdisk and a few other little command line ntfs recovery ones were my first look (testdisk pops up on a few forums…), but apparently most of the free stuff just looks for backup allocation tables and attempts to reassign them. Had no luck. Having a look at both the other suggestions now…just have to wait for the scanning to complete
And if that doesn’t work so could see if it recognises the files as .zip through a deep scan, as they effectively are even though the extension is different.
I’ve now tried a couple of different tools; each seems to have it’s own unique approach as each has recovered a different selection of files. This is great news as I’ve managed to recover almost everything important. Thanks again for the suggestions; I left it hanging for a bit this week as I had a bit of a health scare (which also looks like it will be sorted out, thankfully…) but wanted to let you guys know that it’s very much appreciated as I would probably have given up by now otherwise
Great news Alex! Actually something i’ve forgotten to say in my first post is, that after such things happened the first thing to do should be actually a sector by sector image from the harddisk. The reason for this is, that after trying out various “rescue tools” you can very easily restore any failed rescuing attempts and start fresh with the next tool.
In the past i used Search and Rescue, which was great if your drive was FAT or FAT32… the tool scanned your drive for fileheaders and chunk-pointers and then showed the possible filenames in lines and gave it a colour how much chance you had to save it… Green for almost 100% certain, Yellow for maybe you get the whole file and red for almost no chance this file can be recovered completely.
You also required to have another driver attached, but if you only want to recover some selective range of files, such type of recovery tool is what you need most and perhaps what you want to salvage does fit on a 250GB partition.
