By now, you probably have guessed that before running Lost and Found, you must exit
Windows and bring your machine up in DOS! It is best to have a second hard drive, or a
removable media drive, or one of the newer floppy drives, to recover your files to. Lost
and Found tells you the size of the files it is recovering and how long the process will
take. The program comes on two 3.5 inch 1.44 floppies.
The Lost and Found manual is very small, but I always read the manual at least twice
before I try to run any new program. I think this is a sensible procedure.
To start Lost and Found, insert disk 1 and start the computer. It comes up in Caldera
DR-DOS version 7.02.
You are presented with a screen that asks you to select the SOURCE DRIVE. This is the
drive you want to recover files from. It may be the floppy drive or any of the hard drives
shown. Choose to analyze an entire drive to locate files that are not visible and do not
have a drive letter.
I chose the floppy drive as the drive to use as the SOURCE DRIVE so it would be faster.
The disk is analyzed and a screen tells you what has been found. Current disk cylinder,
the Head number, the Sector number and the Logical Block Address are displayed as the scan
progresses. Hit enter and you will see the listing of the files on the disk. In my case, I
was using an old disk, and the screen I see fills the monitor. It lists very many files.
The undamaged files are at the top, and all sorts of files are listed just below these
undamaged files. You may select any file to be recovered by hitting the space bar to mark
that file. Then hit escape and you go back to the first screen. The files are color coded
so you can tell if they are easily recoverable (light green); possible recovery (yellow);
unlikely recoverable (red); and so on.
Continue following the menu on the screen and you will recover the files you
"mark". I recovered an old (1996) Lotus Wordpro file that was 1,007,476 bytes in
length. This file was marked with a YELLOW color, which means possible to recover. I did
not want to test with a file that was marked LIGHT GREEN or easily recoverable. The file
was on drive A: the floppy drive, and I recovered it to drive D: my second hard drive.
Enough of recovering. There are utilities on disk two of Lost and Found. Refresh brings
back the long file names created under Windows 95, 98, or NT. Restore restores files you
recovered using the compressed form.
Now it is not practical to deliberately crash a hard disk just to prove this program
works as advertised. So I will list the attributes of the program as listed on their
shrink wrapped cover:
Unlike other data repair and recovery software solutions, Lost & Found:
- Does not need to be installed prior to the recovery of lost or corrupted files.
- Does not alter, write to or attempt to repair critical sectors on the damaged disk,
increasing the chances of a successful data recovery. Recovers your files even after
reformatting, as long as you have not written over them.
- Performs a disk analysis and reports the odds of recovery via color coding. Allows you
to save data to a network drive.
- Offers exceptional data error handling, allowing you to recover files from disks that
have suffered head crashes or other damage.
- Recovers lost or damaged data even if the critical sectors, such as the boot sector or
root directory, are corrupted or missing.
- Recovers data from both FAT16 and FAT32 partitions. Works with all possible IDE, EIDE
and SCSI disk drive configurations.
The experience I have had with PowerQuest tells me that the above are reliable
statements. I have played with the program and deleted files and recovered them, formatted
disks and still recovered files! And so I ask you to accept the above as a review of this
program. If anyone has an old hard disk that I can use that has been really crashed but
still rotates, I will attempt to recover anything you may want from it.
The cost for Lost and Found is $69.95 list, but probably $30 to User Group members. http://www.powerquest.com is the URL to the home
page. u
