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Ghost 15 panic! (Read 4743 times)
Christie
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Ghost 15 panic!
Jan 12th, 2013 at 4:44am
 
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 Sad   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!
 
 
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Re: Ghost 15 panic!
Reply #1 - Jan 12th, 2013 at 4:31pm
 
@
Christie

Welcome to Radified Forums--sorry to hear you are visiting in a *panic*.

Quote:
I firmly believe that 'if the data is there, it's recoverable', regardless of format

I don't have an answer specific to your question--I can only answer in general terms.

First, if you hope to recover anything, you should retire that HDD from any use until you have a *clear path* to recovery--it should not be hooked up where Windows can do any of it's background processes that might write to the HDD--recovery points, system files, etc..  The fewer writes to the HDD, the more likely something can be done.

Quote:
2TB drive, with a 120GB ghost v2i on it, the first 10GB for overwrote with /another/ v2i, same name same folder, by accident.

That doesn't look good!  Ghost files are in a proprietary format, and I've never heard of anyone or any software that can access the data in the file except the Ghost program itself.

Quote:
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',

You can probably find something to copy the *raw data* from one HDD to another, but that doesn't help you .....

Quote:
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" :/

Probably, there just isn't any program or person who can access that *raw data* so as to get anything meaningful.  The data is compressed and stored in the Ghost proprietary format--so nothing is likely out there.

Quote:
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.....

That's probably your only route--but, I also suspect it will be a negative outcome.

You could try here:  Norton Support

An alternative--depending on how important the data is--would be to contact professional recovery experts to see if there's any chance they could pull out the original over-written file plus the rest of the Ghost image file back to the original whole image file so you can access it via the normal Ghost programs.  These folks can find the trace magnetic ghost (literally) image of the file still present on the HDD that's hidden below the newly written image file.  But, the downside will be cost.  I can't even guess at the expense--but, if it's important enough--you could make inquires.

Does the original source for the Ghost image no longer exist?

Quote:
I know for a fact i'm far from the first person with a problem like this

Clearly, overwriting an image with an identical name, and in the same sub-directory is something that does happen--intentionally and/or by accident.  If unintentional, usually it only happens once for a given individual.  Using unique file names and unique sub-directories are critical to safe imaging and protecting existing images.

 

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