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SD card undelete



 
 
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  #1  
Old May 27th 18, 07:07 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default SD card undelete

Any ideas about this? I've downloaded Kickass,
which is OSS. Right now I'm on my 3rd attempt
to try a free commercial product. I'm currently
trying Recuva.

So far I've tried EaseUS and Minitool. Both were
"free". Neither spoke of limitations anywhere I
could find. Both found deleted files. But then
they announced I could only retrieve 500 MB or
1 GB, respectively, with the "free" version.
Buy Now! Buy Now! They're actually both just
trialware posing as free. (And not cheap!)

These things have become so oily that it's
impossible to figure out what's actually free
without wasting a lot of time. Surely there must
be a known, best-of, free product for recovering
deleted file?


Ads
  #2  
Old May 27th 18, 07:37 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
dadiOH[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 88
Default SD card undelete


"Mayayana" wrote in message
news
Any ideas about this? I've downloaded Kickass,
which is OSS. Right now I'm on my 3rd attempt
to try a free commercial product. I'm currently
trying Recuva.

So far I've tried EaseUS and Minitool. Both were
"free". Neither spoke of limitations anywhere I
could find. Both found deleted files. But then
they announced I could only retrieve 500 MB or
1 GB, respectively, with the "free" version.
Buy Now! Buy Now! They're actually both just
trialware posing as free. (And not cheap!)

These things have become so oily that it's
impossible to figure out what's actually free
without wasting a lot of time. Surely there must
be a known, best-of, free product for recovering
deleted file?


Well, EaseUS has one. Not free but they offer money back if it doesn't
recover. They couldn't, they did but only after massive amounts of kicking
and screaming.


  #3  
Old May 27th 18, 08:02 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Fokke Nauta[_4_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 587
Default SD card undelete

On 27/05/2018 20:37, dadiOH wrote:
"Mayayana" wrote in message
news
Any ideas about this? I've downloaded Kickass,
which is OSS. Right now I'm on my 3rd attempt
to try a free commercial product. I'm currently
trying Recuva.

So far I've tried EaseUS and Minitool. Both were
"free". Neither spoke of limitations anywhere I
could find. Both found deleted files. But then
they announced I could only retrieve 500 MB or
1 GB, respectively, with the "free" version.
Buy Now! Buy Now! They're actually both just
trialware posing as free. (And not cheap!)

These things have become so oily that it's
impossible to figure out what's actually free
without wasting a lot of time. Surely there must
be a known, best-of, free product for recovering
deleted file?


Well, EaseUS has one. Not free but they offer money back if it doesn't
recover. They couldn't, they did but only after massive amounts of kicking
and screaming.



I use the EasUS one. No problems, works allways.
And - if you want something good, you'll have to pay for it.

Fokke
  #4  
Old May 27th 18, 08:04 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Shadow
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,638
Default SD card undelete

On Sun, 27 May 2018 14:07:32 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

Any ideas about this? I've downloaded Kickass,
which is OSS. Right now I'm on my 3rd attempt
to try a free commercial product. I'm currently
trying Recuva.

So far I've tried EaseUS and Minitool. Both were
"free". Neither spoke of limitations anywhere I
could find. Both found deleted files. But then
they announced I could only retrieve 500 MB or
1 GB, respectively, with the "free" version.
Buy Now! Buy Now! They're actually both just
trialware posing as free. (And not cheap!)

These things have become so oily that it's
impossible to figure out what's actually free
without wasting a lot of time. Surely there must
be a known, best-of, free product for recovering
deleted file?


First make a backup of that SD card.

USB Imagetool

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html#download

(needs uggh .NET)

or PassMark's offering

https://www.osforensics.com/tools/write-usb-images.html

(you can always do a hex search of the image if the card goes
plonk)

Both are free.

Then (and only then) try Recuva.
Good luck.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012
  #5  
Old May 27th 18, 09:30 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default SD card undelete

"Mayayana" wrote

.......
Interesting results here. EaseUS sess all the files,
takes a ridiculous amount of time, but will recover
up to 500 MB.

Con: $70 to do more. YThat seems absurd for a
FAT32 analyzer. There must be something else free
that can do the same thing.

Recuva, Minitool and Kickass all found olny corrupt
files. Minitool claimed to save out 1 GB worth but
they were all nonsense.

So I'm still looking for a highly competent, free
undelete. I don't mind paying for important software,
but recovering deleted files shouldn't be so expensive
and I can't believe that someone hasn't created a
free version. On the bright side, I have an SD card to
experiment with. Anything that can find all those
photos for free wins the contest.


  #6  
Old May 27th 18, 10:39 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Shadow
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,638
Default SD card undelete

On Sun, 27 May 2018 16:30:29 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"Mayayana" wrote

......
Interesting results here. EaseUS sess all the files,
takes a ridiculous amount of time, but will recover
up to 500 MB.

Con: $70 to do more. YThat seems absurd for a
FAT32 analyzer. There must be something else free
that can do the same thing.

Recuva, Minitool and Kickass all found olny corrupt
files. Minitool claimed to save out 1 GB worth but
they were all nonsense.

So I'm still looking for a highly competent, free
undelete. I don't mind paying for important software,
but recovering deleted files shouldn't be so expensive
and I can't believe that someone hasn't created a
free version. On the bright side, I have an SD card to
experiment with. Anything that can find all those
photos for free wins the contest.


If you made an image of the card you can try all sorts of
software, and if they mess up just burn the image back to the SD. Both
image softwares I mentioned copy ALL the sectors, even the gibberish
ones.
If you just deleted, I can't understand why Recuva didn't
work. It's never failed me. OTOH, if you deleted and then took more
pictures, the original ones are probably overwritten and unreadable.
[]'s

--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012
  #7  
Old May 27th 18, 10:45 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default SD card undelete

Mayayana wrote:
"Mayayana" wrote

......
Interesting results here. EaseUS sess all the files,
takes a ridiculous amount of time, but will recover
up to 500 MB.

Con: $70 to do more. YThat seems absurd for a
FAT32 analyzer. There must be something else free
that can do the same thing.

Recuva, Minitool and Kickass all found olny corrupt
files. Minitool claimed to save out 1 GB worth but
they were all nonsense.

So I'm still looking for a highly competent, free
undelete. I don't mind paying for important software,
but recovering deleted files shouldn't be so expensive
and I can't believe that someone hasn't created a
free version. On the bright side, I have an SD card to
experiment with. Anything that can find all those
photos for free wins the contest.



The claim here, is it works on FAT.
No mention of NTFS ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undeletion

I tried this one in a simple test, and it
worked. But the test case was carefully controlled
or contrived, so it couldn't help but get the right
result :-)

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

(Doesn't rely on file system)

Here is another.

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

Seems to offer a free version.
No indication it springs they ole "$39.95 please" trick.

In the picture here, the "red" entries indicate cluster
overlap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuva

Yes, you can flip the single byte that controls
deletion in a FAT entry, but if the cluster numbers
in that entry happen to overlap, that means a write
done after the deletion, has reused the clusters already.
Even if the FAT entry itself is still intact.

I had some other tool, which I can't find a reference to
now, that has text for each file, with words like "good"
indicating no cluster overlap and damage due to subsequent
write operations.

And this is where programs like Photorec take
over. They might not even rely on the FAT, instead
scanning for identifying information. But if the
files are fragmented, and don't fit a single cluster,
then you can't expect the files to make any sense.
The information inside a file, probably isn't sufficient
to reassemble all the pieces. Only a file format that
made some assumptions about storage could do that. Like
writing a GUID into every 4KB segment or something.
And I'm not aware of any file formats that do that.

So if Recuva showed "Red" for everything, or a text
listing of files indicates "Bad" or "overlap" or the
like, then probably too many writes have been done
to the partition, since the event.

If I was doing that here, I'd probably "image" the SD
to a file and work on the "image" rather than the SD
itself. As any scans might work faster. And getting that
to work, would be its own little project, since the
typical imaging situation only captures "visible" files
when imaging. If using Macrium, Smart Copy would have
to be turned off, and I've been let down by tools and
their "dumb copy" option before. If a dumb copy takes two hours
normally, and some tool does it in only ten minutes,
then you know the tool doesn't actually work properly.

Paul
  #8  
Old May 27th 18, 10:50 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Apd
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 132
Default SD card undelete

"Mayayana" wrote:
Interesting results here. EaseUS sess all the files,
takes a ridiculous amount of time, but will recover
up to 500 MB.

Con: $70 to do more. YThat seems absurd for a
FAT32 analyzer. There must be something else free
that can do the same thing.


If the files were deleted normally the chain of pointers to clusters
in the file allocation table will have been zeroed and all you will
have is the erased directory entry which contains the first cluster
number of the file. So, providing the drive has not been subsequently
written to, you can only be sure of recovering the contents of the
first cluster of each file. If file_size = cluster_size then you can
recover the whole file. Otherwise, if the file was fragmented (not
stored in contiguous clusters) you won't be able to recover the pieces
automatically.

Recuva, Minitool and Kickass all found olny corrupt
files. Minitool claimed to save out 1 GB worth but
they were all nonsense.


As you can see, there's no guarantee you will get them back.
I do know that Win 2000 corrupted one of the bits (or bytes) of the
first cluster number in the deleted directory entry so that made it
more tricky. I don't know if later OS's corrected this.

So I'm still looking for a highly competent, free
undelete. I don't mind paying for important software,
but recovering deleted files shouldn't be so expensive
and I can't believe that someone hasn't created a
free version. On the bright side, I have an SD card to
experiment with. Anything that can find all those
photos for free wins the contest.


In the old days I used Norton Utilities 4.5 to recover a
whole FAT 16 hard disk (probably about 20 MB) manually.
It had recently been defragmented so I succeeded but it took
ages because I checked that every recovered file was valid.


  #9  
Old May 28th 18, 03:50 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default SD card undelete

"Shadow" wrote

| If you just deleted, I can't understand why Recuva didn't
| work. It's never failed me. OTOH, if you deleted and then took more
| pictures, the original ones are probably overwritten and unreadable.

They were only deleted. I don't understand that
myself. The only thing I could think was that maybe
EaseUS somehow affected the layout so that other
software got confused. But I don't see any reason
it might do that.

The images were just copied, then deleted, then
the card wasn't used again.


  #10  
Old May 28th 18, 03:56 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default SD card undelete

"Apd" wrote

| If the files were deleted normally the chain of pointers to clusters
| in the file allocation table will have been zeroed and all you will
| have is the erased directory entry which contains the first cluster
| number of the file. So, providing the drive has not been subsequently
| written to, you can only be sure of recovering the contents of the
| first cluster of each file.

Makes sense. Yet the files are mostly 5-6 MB, much
bigger than clusters. And EaseUS successfully recovered
all of the most recently saved files -- about 1 GB worth.
Yet none of the other programs did.

| In the old days I used Norton Utilities 4.5 to recover a
| whole FAT 16 hard disk (probably about 20 MB) manually.
| It had recently been defragmented so I succeeded but it took
| ages because I checked that every recovered file was valid.
|
That usually seems to work well. But isn't that
just a matter of finding the partition boundaries,
while the file allocation table is still intact?


  #11  
Old May 28th 18, 03:56 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default SD card undelete

Mayayana wrote:
"Shadow" wrote

| If you just deleted, I can't understand why Recuva didn't
| work. It's never failed me. OTOH, if you deleted and then took more
| pictures, the original ones are probably overwritten and unreadable.

They were only deleted. I don't understand that
myself. The only thing I could think was that maybe
EaseUS somehow affected the layout so that other
software got confused. But I don't see any reason
it might do that.

The images were just copied, then deleted, then
the card wasn't used again.


This is why I like to make sector-by-sector copies
of stuff needing repair, if I can.

This might be able to convert a "dd" copy to
another more usable format. This tool is packed with something
so I'd need WINE to take it apart for a look. Really,
this is the sort of thing that should be command-line.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...onverter.shtml

Paul
  #12  
Old May 28th 18, 06:02 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default SD card undelete

Mayayana wrote:
"Shadow" wrote

| If you just deleted, I can't understand why Recuva didn't
| work. It's never failed me. OTOH, if you deleted and then took more
| pictures, the original ones are probably overwritten and unreadable.

They were only deleted. I don't understand that
myself. The only thing I could think was that maybe
EaseUS somehow affected the layout so that other
software got confused. But I don't see any reason
it might do that.

The images were just copied, then deleted, then
the card wasn't used again.



https://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Dat...-75184619.html

"This software doesn't work. It will "recover" your file
(but only the file name) and corrupt it beyond repair.
You'll never get it open, even if you use other software
to recover raw deleted data to piece it back together."

So at least one reviewer there, seems to feel it has side effects.

Normally, for data recovery, the source volume would be treated
read-only.

It would require some testing with a clean setup, to see
what it had done to the file it was working on.

Paul
  #13  
Old May 28th 18, 11:46 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Apd
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 132
Default SD card undelete

"Mayayana" wrote:
"Apd" wrote
| In the old days I used Norton Utilities 4.5 to recover a
| whole FAT 16 hard disk (probably about 20 MB) manually.
| It had recently been defragmented so I succeeded but it took
| ages because I checked that every recovered file was valid.
|
That usually seems to work well. But isn't that
just a matter of finding the partition boundaries,
while the file allocation table is still intact?


The FAT isn't intact when the file is deleted - the cluster chain for
that file is zeroed. All you have is the first cluster number in the
old directory entry. Unless it offers you a manual method, all an
undelete utility can do is assume the file was not fragmented and keep
adding next available clusters (from its starting cluster) until the
size (also in the old dir entry) plus slack space is reached.

If you made a backup of the FAT before deleting and the utility is
able to make use of it then you have no problem. FAT 32 does keep a
second copy of the FAT but normal deletion will zero that also.

The Norton advanced recovery would step through each erased directory
entry allowing you to add clusters automatically or select them
yourself. In either case, before saving, you could inspect the
contents of each one and try alternatives if the file didn't look
right.


  #14  
Old May 28th 18, 12:44 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Shadow
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Posts: 1,638
Default SD card undelete

On Sun, 27 May 2018 17:45:01 -0400, Paul
wrote:

If I was doing that here, I'd probably "image" the SD
to a file and work on the "image" rather than the SD
itself.


Why I recommended using PassMark's portable tool to make a
backup byte by byte image before trying anything else.

https://www.osforensics.com/tools/write-usb-images.html

You can write it back to the card (or another one if the first
one is failing) without messing up the original. I've never tried
mounting the image, but it should be possible.
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012
  #15  
Old May 28th 18, 02:41 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default SD card undelete

"Paul" wrote

|
|
https://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Dat...-75184619.html
|
| "This software doesn't work. It will "recover" your file
| (but only the file name) and corrupt it beyond repair.
| You'll never get it open, even if you use other software
| to recover raw deleted data to piece it back together."
|
| So at least one reviewer there, seems to feel it has side effects.
|

I take those things with a grain of salt. Like someone
who's never boiled water reviewing a special frying pan:
"Junk! It burns everything!"

EaseUS did find all the images and easily retrieved the
recent ones.... within the demo limitations.

But it's good to know. On the other hand, it seems like
there are two likely conclusions: Only EaseUS works really
well, or EaseUS corrupted the data so that I'd have to
buy the product in order to get the images. The second
possibility seems farfetched. It's hard to imagine them
getting away with that. (Though I didn't check the EULA
to see whether it says,"By using this product you agree
that we will hold your data hostage and ruin your disks."
.....So who knows?)

I don't really get why you and Shadow both talk about
backing up a byte-by-byte image. I suppose that never
hurts, but I was really just interested in something that
can retrieve deleted files. Either they can be accessed or
they can't.

I'm still hoping to find the ultimate, super-duper, OSS
option to test that on the SD card before using it again.
I'm finding it hard to believe that such basic operations
as retrieving deleted files can only be done by one
$70 program.

| Normally, for data recovery, the source volume would be treated
| read-only.
|
| It would require some testing with a clean setup, to see
| what it had done to the file it was working on.
|

That would be beyond my expertise or curiosity.
There's not enough longterm usefulness for me
to buckle down and start learning how to analyze
storage bytes and master FAT32 formatting. But
if you do it, please let us know.


 




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