in a nutshell:
2TB drive, with a 120GB ghost v2i on it, the first 10GB for overwrote with /another/ v2i, same name same folder, by accident.
The other 110GB is fine, and should be contiguous even -- but it's now buried in free space, with no pointers, no MFT entry, nothing - just raw data in freespace.
But it's there, and if I can get it, and decomress it, i'll have a plain old NTFS parttion fragment I can use any regular recovery software on, and get the 10GB or so of really critical stuff buried in that, back.
As best I can tell what needs doing is to raw-write that freespace to a file on another drive (300GB, probably almost all ghost data actually, so likely more than one copy of what I'm trying to find) -- then, once I have that file, feed that into *something* that can scan it for the 'this is v2i data' signature, and decompress anything it finds to /another/ file.
That file, if I'm understanding things right, would be a normal NTFS parttion, albiet likely a collection of partition pieces; which I can then use data recovery software on-- if I'm lucky, with a copy of the MFT at the end of it, to hopefully get things recovered with proper names (i'm not holding my breath, I'll be happy to get the files even if I have to rename them by hand)
What would be even better is for something that scanned the freespace and decomressed it directly, taking out that middle step of 'copy raw into a file'.... is there *ANYTHING* that can do either of those, recover my data from a perfectly fine v2i file that is only missing the header and first 10%-ish?
I firmly believe that 'if the data is there, it's recoverable', regardless of format- I'm having trouble even just finding something to image /just/ the free space to a file, though, everything i've found so far is 'all or nothing', and the rest of the disk would just get in the way of my recovery, even if I had a drive big enoguh to hold it.
There's about 1.5TB on the drive, and 300GB of free space. All i /need/ is to extract what's in the freespace, but i can't find any data recovery programs that can extract /data/ - they all look for specific file types, I can't find anything that'll say "oh, this has a structure, even thought I don't know what it is, I'll save this clump too" :/
I can't believe there's nothing possible to recover it, surely someone someplace has something that could, symantec's got something in-houe if nothing else, but I'm sure someone somepalce has something that'd work
I'm trying to get ahold of someone in symantec, but I get the impression only someone on the dev/programming team would be able to do what I need to do.....
I know for a fact i'm far from the first person with a problem like this, and the idea symantec hasn't got a way to recover from it, is simply mindboggling-- especially with their corporate userbase.
Sorry if thats a bit of a ramble, it's past 3am here-- but I hope the problem's clear enough someone can, hopefully, find something that can help!