Conference 7.286::atarist

With out the old directory you have lost the "pointers" to the start of each
of the files. If you are sure that ONLY the directory was trashed and that the
FAT is intact then you could probably write a program to follow the links
through the FAT and build directory entries for them with arbitrary file
names. If all the files on the disk were of the same type then this may not be
to bad, but if there is a mixture of executibles, text files, songfiles,
etc... it may take a lot of trial and error to figure out which files are
which. Actualy you could probably have your program look for magic numbers and
determine if a file was an executible or not. It could also make reasonable
assumptions as to wheather a file was an ascii text file or not. Humm...
Starting to sound like it might be a fun project IF you weren't forced into
writting because of a bad disk :-).

Not a lot of help I guess, just some random thoughts on the problem.

	Ray

    On the other hand, if you have PC-DITTO, the Norton Utilites work
    perfectly well for repairing Atari file systems.
    				- hbm

Unfortunately I don't program on my Atari and know nothing about atari's FAT
(though I know what it is).  There were only song files on it.  Didn't 
someone somewhere already have this problem?  I think the FAT is still good as
the "new" directory can't find the "new" files. Searching...  I do plan on
starting to hack around the Atari after I get Turbo C and my hard disk finished

Chad

Isn't there a copy of the directory (or is it the FAT :-( ) somewhere on the
disk?  Maybe that didn't get updated.

Chad

darn switch I have on my drive for media change detect...

There are two copies of the FAT, there are not two copies of directories.

The problem that was discussed already was someone who had deleted his files.
When you delete files all you are realy doing is marking them as deleted, you
are not realy destroying anything (ie: your directory is "destroyed"). So it
is an "easy" matter to "undelete" the files as long as you haven't created any
new files subsequent to the deletion. In fact a public domain UNDELETE program 
does exist for the ST, but it requires that the directory be in tact.


	Ray

    Hello all,

    Have anybody a "undelete" program which works also with hard disks?
    I've deleted an entire partition from my harddisk with for me VERY
    important datas and of course I've forgotten to make a backup before. 

    How could that be happen? I've taken the wrong icon (in NeoDesk) and put it 
    in the trash, then after one second the partition was empty. I know that
    the datas (files) are still on this partition but I need a program which
    reconstruct all the files including folders.
    Any help is higly welcome. 
                        
    Thanks in advance,

    Wolf

    
    first of all, don't write anything onto this partition as this will
    overwrite files then. If you have a disk-monitor (like in HARLEKIN)
    you could search for "E5". In the directory of the disk the first
    character of a file gets replaced by the HEX value E5 when the file
    is being deleted. Edit this E5 to the hex equivilant of a normal
    alphabetical character to get the file back. But you should use this
    as the last chance in case you don't get a undelete program. 
    The "ST Sonderdisk" ORDNE_HD has a very good undelete option. Try to
    get this one first...
    
    Bernd
    

    
Bernd,

Thats it! Realy, thanks a lot!!!!!!!!

I'll try to get the "ST Sonderdisk" ORDNE_HD from the
ST-Computer-mag. (I think they have it).

Thanks again,
Wolfgang

    Also, get a physical backup of the partition before you do anything.

    That way, if anything goes wrong, you can start over.

    Jim Patterson

Don't get too excited.  Those instructions were for undeleting a single file.

It sounds like you told NeoDESK to erase the root directory and fat
table.  Finding files that were in the root directory is in general
very difficult.  However, finding the subdirectories is not too
difficult, since they have a very recognizable pattern, and that will
give you the starting cluser of files in those folders.  The problem is
that if the files you want are not contiguous, the lack of a FAT table
will make it difficult to find the subsequent clusters.

Generally, it takes substantial understanding of the disk structures as
well as some good tools in order to piece it all together.  Last time I
had to do this, I borrowed an MSDOS file system expert and together we
wrote some specialized programs to search the disk for the data I
wanted, and copy it off to another partition as we found it.

Good luck, you'll need it.