HDD GURU FORUMS

I purchased the Pro license and am using the program to recover data from an Ext3 partition that was part of a WD Own Cloud partition. The program works very well with one problem: it doesn't distinguish between upper- and lower-case extension names so I get numerous false "Duplicate file name" errors.

I have told it to auto-rename the duplicates (maximum of 1,000,000 times) but it keeps stopping on each duplicate encountered asking me how to handle the duplicate file name. I can't baby-sit this job: it took 25 hours to create the clone of the patient drive, the major partition being the data partition I am trying to recover. Here is a sample of the files detected as having duplicate file names:

http://prntscr.com/9fxehh

Can anyone tell me how to make it stop detecting these "duplicates" as duplicates, which they clearly are not. I can't find any option telling it to ignore case used for extensions, nor do I know why it keeps prompting me on more duplicate file names.

I can't answer your question, but could it be that DMDE is bothering you with duplicate file names only because Windows is insensitive to case, not DMDE itself?

Are you trying to recover the files to an NTFS or FAT32 volume under Windows? If so, have you considered mounting an ext3 or ext2 volume (with an appropriate Windows file system driver) and then recovering your files to the ext3 volume? Alternatively you might like to recover your files to a network drive.

there is a Linux version of DMDE (console). Might help. Maybe the author might be interested in this scenario to further develop handling of it.

fzabkar wrote:I can't answer your question, but could it be that DMDE is bothering you with duplicate file names only because Windows is insensitive to case, not DMDE itself?

I believe that's the root of the problem. Dmitry responded very promptly to my e-mail (thanks!) and asked if both source and destination drives were using non-windows file systems. They are (Ext3 & HFS/HFS+) but it seems Windows itself is the culprit.

...have you considered mounting an ext3 or ext2 volume (with an appropriate Windows file system driver) and then recovering your files to the ext3 volume? Alternatively you might like to recover your files to a network drive.

I've installed MacDrive (trial) and a drive pre-formatted on a Mac, and DMDE can access them okay as source and destination drives. Other than the renaming of duplicate folder/file names, and the occasional file error, the recovery is progressing well. The repeated requests for how to handle duplicates have stopped, having happened just a few times.

Last night, I tried accessing the data using a live Mint CD and it just sees inodes. My Mac sees the 4TB clone containing the Ext3 data partition but can't enumerate the partitions. ReclaiMe proved no more help but I forget exactly what it saw (didn't take notes and my mind was boggled by then).

My next step is to inquire about the Linux version of DMDE (thanks, Brian!). If I can use it, I will recover the data to the HFS drive and my customer would be happy to just stick that in an external enclosure and access his files that way.

Cheers,
Larry

Problem solved! I had formatted the destination disk "Mac OS Extended, Journaled," instead of "Mac OS Extended, Journaled (case sensitive)." Once I corrected that, I was able to recover and save folders and files that otherwise were considered duplicates.

Another problem cropped up after that however: path lengths longer than 259 characters. That was solved by pre-pending "\\?\" to the path name, yielding in my case: \\?\G:\
where G:\ is the Mac formatted drive made accessible with the help of MacDrive.