Slashdot Mirror

[...continued from previous message. AG]
LSoft Technologies - Active@ Boot Disk, Active@ File Recovery and Active-Undelete
Micware Software - Encopy
Naltech - Multi Data Rescue (optical discs only?)
Nucleus Tecnologies - Kernel Recovery for FAT+NTFS
Ontrack Data Recovery - Easy Recovery Professional
Paragon Software Group - Paragon Rescue Kit
Partition Support - FindPart (and other utilities)
Phelps, Eric - Uncheck (for .CHK files)'
Piriform - Recuva
Phoenix Technologies Undelete+
ProSoft Engineering - Data Rescue PC
Quetek Consulting Corp. - File Scavenger
R-Tools Technology - R-Studio Data Recovery
Recover Data - Windows Data Recovery
Regall LLC (dba Object Rescue) - File Rescue and Data Rescue and Any Reader
Runtime Software - GetDataBack
Smart PC Solutions - Smart FAT Recovery
SoftLogica - Handy Recovery
Stellar Information Systems - Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery
SysTech Software - RECOVER Fixed/Floppy Disk FAT32 /16 /12 v3.0 Release 3 (floppy diskttes and hard disks <2GB)
TOKIWA - DataRecovery (erased files only?)
Zero Assumption Recovery - ZAR32 for Windows

Programs that I have personally used and had good experiences with are Acronis' Recovery Expert, DataRescue's Photo Rescue, Naltech's Data Rescue line and Runtime Software's GetDataBack line.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Not free, but I have paid for a copy of Active@Boot (www.ntfs.com - http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm). It boots into Windows PE and lets you access the drives (as well as the Network/Internet). I restored to a network mounted drive since I was recovering a laptop drive and had no way of physically mounting it into my desktop. Boots from CD or USB. Some other features that you may or may not use, but the drive recovery was very effective (including across multiple repartitions, formats, and installs of windows).

There is a free trial.

I would suggest Active Hard Disk Monitor for hard drive testing, since it gives a VERY detailed listing of all the hard drives attributes. Error rates, seek times, etc. It has saved my rear on more than one occasion. And I would also run filemon if the SMART checks out okay as there may be a program doing a lot of I/O that wasn't previously.

Have filemon log for 20-60 minutes then go through the log. If there is something pounding the HDD it will jump out on the log. But usually here in the shop when someone complains that "it just got slow" and it isn't a virus it can usually be traced to the HDD. Either PIO mode, a drive beginning to fail, or some crappy program that has decided to update something on the drive a couple of dozen times a second. Anyway I hope this helps and is a good example IMHO of why daily differential backups are a GOOD thing.

And it wasn't that long ago that NTFS couldn't be used on a volume larger than 4GB.... then 32GB.

What?

Are you talking about Fat16/Fat32??? From what I remember, the 32gb was an OS imposed limit on XP...... until sp2 maybe? I don't remember exactly....

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

While not what MS intended, I don't see why someone doesn't do something with Windows PE ( Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment ). It'll pretty much run anything XP will, has full networking support, etc. All without the normal Windows bloat.

I first learned about it when I bought a copy of Active@Boot Disk ( http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm ) to recover data from a corrupted / failed hard-drive. [Works great, BTW.]

Layne

Interesting: Format a Flash drive as NTFS.

I wonder if that would make the flash drive more reliable, since NTFS is more reliable than FAT?

Don't use Windows OS encryption. According to Microsoft technical support, it is not reliable.

Can I install this on a free partition on my Windows XP box?

How big does this parition need to be?

Do I get a choice of OS when I turn the power switch on?

Will it run on my P3 450, 512mb ram, geforce 2 64mb? Will it run faster than the install of XP I currently have on it?

Goddamn, will people stop saying this?!? I've formatted a 200GB hard drive as FAT with the Windows XP installer. There is no 32GB limit.

OK, here is the Real Deal:

• FAT itself can be up to 2 terabytes in size. FAT32: 2TB (theoretically 8 TB) FAT16: 4GB FAT12: 16MB.
• Large FAT partitions can be hugely wasteful of disk space, because FAT has a limited number of possible entries in the file allocation table itself, and therefore must use ever-larger cluster sizes (think extents) for file storage if you wish to have a large partition. Much disk space is lost to the many resulting partially-filled clusters. We used to call it 'slack'.
• The 32 GB limit (which MS admits is arbitrary) was imposed in the GUI partitioning tool in Windows 2000, and has persisted since. This only applies to partitions created with that formatter; W2000 and above will happily use much larger partitions.
• But the gotcha is that if your FAT filesystem is larger than about 124 gigabytes and it breaks, you will not be able to fix it. Scandisk is the repair tool for FAT filesystems, and it simply cannot process a partition larger than 124.5GB.
• If you want to create a >32GB FAT partition from within the Windows GUI, you can use fat32format.exe.

Other references: Limitations of the FAT32 File System, Raymond Chen, NTFS vs FAT.

How would you know? It's not like Microsoft has released the specification for it...

The windows disk administrator/manager writes a volume id to the boot/partition section of the partition. This is on both NTFS and Fat systems. This Volume id is 4 bytes and contains coded information to suggest a drive letter if it is availible and marked to do so.

Volume serial numbers don't contain any information. They are completely random based on the time. Although, admittedly, you could be talking about something besides the volume serial number, which is actually eight bytes, when you say 'volume ID', but I don't see anything else in the partition boot area you could be talking about.

With a logical Drive, The drive letter is stored in metedata near the end of the NTFS loader code. This system suggests the drive letter asignment to the IO manage which uses the mount manager when the partition information is read. If the drive letter is availible, It is then asigned to that volume.

I don't know what you mean, 'with a logical drive'. I think You're talking about the $Mft, which does indeed have something called $Volume, but that has the partition name and version, not a drive letter. Feel free to read what Microsoft says about it, and feel free to search for 'drive letter' in that document. (It is there, but not in reference to any information in the NTFS or partition.)

And just in case you were trying to assert it was the partition table the held the drive letters instead of the file system, look here and tell me in which of the 16 bytes that this data is stored. Partition tables are very very cramped.

This volume id is also mapped to a registry area HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices wich coresponds to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\DISK which solidifies the drive letter asignment if availible.

Well, duh. That's how partitions get drive letters. The operating system hands them out. DOS handed them out inflexibly, NT lets you move them around. They aren't stored anywhere on the partition or the drive the partition is on, which is rather my point, and hence they can NEVER transfer between XP installs.(1)

But, duh, that's so incredibly easy to test I don't know why we're even discussing this, and I know for a fact it doesn't work how you say, because I had a jump drive that was assigned to drive O or something on my computer, and took the first available one on every other one.

Seriously, Windows has a very ordered way for naming drive letters. It only gets complicated a little by what partition formats the OS version can see as well as any preformed lettering criteria. The first drive letter gets asigned to the first primary partition unless another partition on the first drive is marked active. the rest get asigned to the rest of the primary partition in the order the drivers for the device (NT ) is loaded. Then all logical and extended partitions get lettered and then finaly everything else in order of thier bus gets a letter.

I didn't say it assigned them randomly. I said they were assigned as, and I quote, 'picking the first one as the drives are enumerated in their fairly random order'. The order you just listed? First active partitions on the drive, then inactive primary ones, and then move on to the next drive and repeat? When finished, go back and do the logical ones? Then do all non-hard drives? Yup, that appears to be a fairly random order to me.

1) I did say 'machines' there, but actually if you move a disk with an XP install on it, duh, all the drive letter mappings move with it.

Actually, if you're using NTFS, the data will be stored directly in the file entry in the MFT, taking zero dedicated clusters or sectors. The maximum size for this to happen is like 800 bytes.

Here's a short description of how NTFS allcates space. On volumes larger than 2GB, the cluster size (the granularity the FS uses to allocate space) was 4k already unless you specified something else when formatting the drive. Also, Windows NT has supported disk sector sizes larger than 512 bytes for a long time; it's just that anything else has been rare.

No! It is really limited by 2TB Next, AC, show some proof!

The limit should be 2TB 2TB

I highly doubt Linux users would love ZIP.

And I think they would. So now who's right?

A fully secure filesystem under Linux. Does Windows have that?

Yes, it does. But thanks for playing!

the client allocates the space for the entire file right up front

Wrong, wrong and wrong. BitTorrent uses sparse files now. If you run NTFS, you slowly notice the file size increase as it downloads (it does not allocate all the space it needs at the start of the run).

Sparse files are a way of saying "I want a file that could potentially be X bytes big, but I don't care about the content yet". As the content is filled in, the file size on disk creeps up. This saves time actually allocating the space - but if the content is filled in non-linearly, it's going to cause fragmentation problems.

See here for more information.

I hope I don't sound like a troll... but it's fairly easy to read ntfs from DOS... it would naive to think he meant DOS 6.2 or something...

Look at www.ntfs.com, they offer a DOS boot disk capable of reading NTFS partitions, for free-as-in-beer

My bad that should have been http://www.ntfs.com/

You could always create an NTFS Boot Disk to scan a suspect system. If you want write access, you'll need a boot disk capable of writing data though. Haven't seen a free read/write solution yet...

Norton Antivirus boots from CD and can scan NTFS and FAT filesystems.

And there are a ton of utilities that let you boot "NT" off of a floppy. It copies the kernel and NTFS drivers onto a floppy that you can boot to a DOS prompt (with NTFS r/w) and do the do from there.

When will uninformed Windows critics start being modded as the trolls they are?