"Norton Utilities" for ubuntu

[Leonard Chatagnier]

--- On Tue, 5/26/09, Steve Reilly <sfreilly at roadrunner.com> wrote:

> From: Steve Reilly <sfreilly at roadrunner.com>
> Subject: Re: "Norton Utilities" for ubuntu
> To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Date: Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 8:45 PM
> eyore15 User wrote:
> > I had occasion today to over-write a file I really
> needed.  I thought how 
> > convenient it would be to have file recovery utility
> like Norton Rescue.  
> > I'm pretty sure there is something out there, I just
> don't know what to 
> > call it.  Ideally it would be in the Synaptic
> repositories.
> > 
> > Can you offer me any hope?
> > 
> > I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 on a PS4HT at 3.2.
> > 
> > tnx
> > 
> > mcm
> > 
> > mark c. miller
> > 
> > 
> at first i was going to suggest debugfs, but its been a
> long time since
> ive worked with it and only works with ext2 last i
> knew.  came across
> these you may want to look at, looks like a couple nice
> cross platform
> projects.
> 
> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
> 
> looks like testdisc is in the ubuntu repo
> 
> 
> apt-cache show testdisc
> 
> 
> has anyone ever used these before?
> 
> 
Yes, I have trying to recover a partition with Hardy installed. As I recall, the disk crashed and a restart ran fsck showing a bad block.  Apparently several repeats of fsck messed up the partition(/).  The root partition only showed the lost+found dir which was empty.  With TestDisk I was able to see a lot on the / part that was still there and ran several attempts to recover the bad blocks but was never able to recover the OS and get it to boot.  It's a good program but it was my first attempt with it and I likely made some mistakes.  You really need to study the howto thoroughly.  In my case the disk wasn't really bad; fsck just screwed it up.  I just reinstalled the Hardy OS and it now works fine.
I don't think that the file can be recovered using any utility if it has been overwritten as the OP has said.  That's what I've always heard anyway.  But I'm no expert and could be wrong.
Leonard Chatagnier
lenc5570 at sbcglobal.net