Hello again! I'm trying to recover an HFS+ drive and the file table seems to be 99% deleted (after full scaning with most of the available softwares I get either none or only 7 folders and 16 files). There are thousands of lost files and they are OK, but the customer wants them in their folders because of the requeriments of his system. Has the HFS+ got another copy of the file table, and where is it? The EFI partition is all gone and the first few million sectors of the volume (after the HFS+ signature which is still there with the volume bitmap, at sector 2 hundred thousands something) are all 0x00.
Thank you.

Hola!

Is this a Mac partitioned drive?

Are you mounting it in a Mac, PC or Linux box?

Is there sector damage to the drive or has the partition become corrupted?

Have you imaged the drive yet?

What software are you using on it currently?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I'm working with WinHex, R-Studio and UFSexplorer, mainly. No bad sectors, and I've imaged the drive already. From sector 0 to 6,000,000 the drive is all set to 0x00 except for sectors near 523,000 - 526,000 which have some HFS+ partition information (the volume bitmap or equivalent, and the partition volume header, but no catalog file or file table). It's from a NAS working under MAC, but I'm trying to recover it with a Windows PC.
But, anyway, I think HFS does not save any copy of the Catalog File.

I would suggest taking a look at it with diskwarrior and/or data rescue. Sometimes the non-mac native tools have a harder time with HFS in my experience.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1150.html

Everything you ever wanted to know about hfs+

Thanks Steve, I've already read information in that website. It doesn't say in a explicit manner that there's no copy of the catalog file, it just says where the catalog file is and how does it work, all about Binary Trees... but as I said, I think there's no copy of it. Thanks drccsc, I'll try diskwarrior.

Don't bother your arse with DiskWarrior, waste of time IMO. DataRescueII is your best bet.

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Data Recovery Ireland

I do agree that data rescue is probably better than diskwarrior. But I've had diskwarrior do well from time to time.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Hi,

Give a try to Stellar info's MAC recovery software V3.0.
I am using it for about 6 months and got better results compare to Data Rescue II.

Regards,

I bought Stellar, used it a few times, and then never again.

What do you like about it?

Jon

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

It depends upon what you are using DiskWarrior for. It's not a data recovery program, per se - it fixes directory issues, and does a fine job of that. Directory repair is (or should be) part of the data recovery process.

Jon

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Which one did you use: V. 3.0 under OS X or V.2 under windows?
If V.2.x, then I agree with you. It was not so good.
Stellar V3.0 does better job in finding HFS+ lost partitions and reconstructing file system.
The bad thing is that, it is too slow.

regrads,
Pninja

I only used Stellar for Mac. I don't recall if it was 2.0 or 3 but I know that I upgraded to 3.0.

It took forever to reconstruct the directory. The folders that if found were empty and a big waste of time. There are much better tools out there, IMHO.

Jon

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Assuming if this is the MAC file system, to get back the correct data info, Datarescue will not work. You can forget about Stellar MAC, it only works when you have min system damage and in that case, you do not need it anywhere.

I think you are going in wrong direction.
As it is a NAS, the underlying FS need not be MAc. Most of the time, it is some linux variants.

You probably need to try some ubuntu or debian linux to mount the volume and extract data.

I have no doubt it's entirely working under MAC, the Volume Header (and the Alternate Volume Header) is still there as I said, and it reveals a partition which holds the whole logical space...
And there are no Linux I-Nodes nor MFT records anywhere. And I would not get good RAW data if it were a Linux FS because of the "13th block" for files larger than some tens of kB.

Try UFS explorer.

Already done, thanks.

I have used Nucleus for Mac with some success. Give it a try in demo mode.
One downside was if the folder or filename contained an invalid character like / ? # \ the recovery utility would come to a stop. It just couldn't filter them out whilst recovering.