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Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 2:18 pm
by raven219
Hi.

Think I have completly messed up, but before I give up all hope....

Took the disk out of my Pace 3100 with the intention of copying off the recordings. Connect to PC via IDE cable and while booting there was the sound of breaking glass, so I left to investigate the mess (kids!).

Came back to find that disk check was running. Stopped PC and disconnected drive. After reading these forums I now realise my next action was stupid. I put the disk back in the Sky box and now have a planner full of failed recordings. Took disk out and connected back to PC and now Copy+ can only see 1 recording which isn't even something we recorded!

Is there any way I can recover the disk?

Cheers

Niall

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 11:51 am
by kos129
What files show up on the drive in windows? Are there any folders visible (they will be named with a combination of numbers and the letters A-F)?

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 3:10 pm
by raven219
Working from memory, there was a bunch of files in the root directory and one directory.

Cheers

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 4:50 pm
by pcbbc
Regrettably once the Sky box sees a Windows "check disked" XTVFS volume it does further damage by deleting all the recording directories and their contents.
Past experience has shown it's virtually impossible to recover after this.

Unfortunately putting the disk back in the box was the mistake. I have tools to fairly "undo" the damage from check disk alone - but once the Sky box puts it's hand in the mix, my experience is it's too far gone to do any sort of recovery whatsoever.

Sorry :oops:

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 4:57 pm
by kos129
I have no experience of this kind of corruption on pre-darwin disks after it has been put back in the box (the darwin boxes just 'ignore' the damage but eventually end up overwriting parts of the old recordings with new ones due to the messed up video FAT), but is there any chance it has just marked the recordings as deleted (i.e. set the first letter in the file record to 0xE5 instead of removing it altogether)? With some hex editing it would then be possible to 'undelete' them, there could still be issues if the recording is marked as failed in the planner database though (and I do not know where this would be in the pre-darwin one).

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:19 pm
by raven219
Prepared to try anything at this stage so if anyone could send me any tools/guide I will give them a go.

Thanks

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:38 pm
by pcbbc
kos129 wrote:I have no experience of this kind of corruption on pre-darwin disks after it has been put back in the box (the darwin boxes just 'ignore' the damage but eventually end up overwriting parts of the old recordings with new ones due to the messed up video FAT), but is there any chance it has just marked the recordings as deleted (i.e. set the first letter in the file record to 0xE5 instead of removing it altogether)? With some hex editing it would then be possible to 'undelete' them, there could still be issues if the recording is marked as failed in the planner database though (and I do not know where this would be in the pre-darwin one).
Unfortunately, IIRC, XTVFS also deletes the start cluster from the directory entry in root (as well as marking the entry deleted). So you end up having to scan the disk clusters looking for the sub directory and match it up.
Add to this that all the FAT entries are missing, and most files under XTVFS get fairly well fragmented with even the most simple of recording schedules (and very much so if any dual recording goes on), and trying to piece together all the clusters of the meta data files becomes next to impossible.

Last time I looked at this I spent several weekends attempting a some kind of automated tool to do the recovery and got nowhere....

Re: Any chance of recovery?

PostPosted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 6:05 pm
by kos129
Ah yes, I forgot about the meta data files, trying to find the other clusters of them would be a nightmare, and if its removing the start cluster from the root directory that makes it even more difficult. Unfortunately it looks like there is no real solution to this :(.