:: Deepquest ::

A friend arrived few weeks ago after having his sd card from a digital camera formated for obscure reason. Of course as usual “it’s urgent and important”, I was trying to find an open source that works on OSX. It’s not not I don’t want to pay for the service provide but it’s easier to test or hack GPL product.

After a bit of googling I finally found TestDisk and PhotoRec suite.

TestDisk will check and undelete partition

Works with the following partitions:
– BeFS ( BeOS )
– BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
– CramFS (Compressed File System)
– DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
– HFS, Hierarchical File System
– JFS, IBM’s Journaled File System
– Linux Ext2 and Ext3
– Linux Raid
– Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
– LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
– Netware NSS
– NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP/2003 )
– ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6
– UFS (Sun/BSD/…)
– XFS, SGI’s Journaled File System

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost pictures or lost files from digital camera memory (CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SecureDigital, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, USB Memory Drives…), even Hard Disks and CDRom.

Using it on OSX if you understand the meaning of “terminal”. Photorec is CLI (Command Line Interface) and not software with a useless graphical interface.

How it works ?

PhotoRec searchs known file header and because there is no data fragmentation (usually), it can recover the whole file.

Photorec recognises numerous file format including:

Archive
.7z 7zip archive file
.bz2 bzip2 compressed data
.gz gzip compressed data
.rar Rar archive
.tar tar archive
.zip zip archive

Multimedia
.asf, .wma, .wmv: Advanced Streaming Format used for Audio/Video
.au Sun/NeXT audio data
.avi .wav RIFF audio/video
.bmp BMP bitmap image
.crw Canon Raw picture
.ctg Canon catalog
.dsc Nikon dsc
.gif Graphic Interchange Format
.jpg JPG picture
.mov MOV video
.mp3 MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1 audio
.mpg Moving Picture Experts Group video
.mrw Minolta Raw picture
.ogg OGG Vorbis audio
.orf Olympus Raw Format picture
.png Portable Network Graphics
.raf Raw Fujifilm picture
.raw Contax picture
.rdc Rollei picture
.sit Mikron
.tif Tag Image File Format
.x3f Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture

Office
.doc Microsoft Word
.mbd Access database
.odd OpenDocument Drawing
.odp OpenDocument Presentation
.ods OpenDocument Spreadsheet
.odt OpenDocument Text
.pap Papyrus word file
.ppt PowerPoint presentation
.rtf Rich Text Format
.sda StarDraw
.sdc StarCalc
.sdd StarImpress
.sdw StarWriter
.slk Sylk, Multiplan Symbolic Link Interchange
.sxc OpenOffice Spreadsheet
.sxd OpenOffice Drawing
.sxi OpenOffice Presentation
.sxw OpenOffice Text Document
.txt Text file
.vis Visio document
.xls Microsoft Excel

Others
.asp ASP script
.bat Batch
.c C source file
.dbf DBase 3 (prone to false positive)
.eps Encasulated PostScript
.exe MS executable
.h C header
.html HTML
.jsp JSP script
.pdf Portable Document Format
.php PHP script
.pl Perl script
.ps PostScript document
.py Python script
.sh Shell script

PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or memory support you are about to recover from. Recovered files are instead written in the directory from where you are running the PhotoRec program.

To use it on OSX (tested on 10.4.*) make sure you have the latest dev tools from apple installed and download TestDisk & PhotoRec 6.3-WIP Make a ./configure and make sudo make install and that’s it. There might have few minor errors during the ./configure process, it wont’t influent the final install process.

Now to run it, you MUST reboot, then you may want to create a symbolink link with the ln command or just do a /usr/local/sbin/photorec or /usr/local/sbin/testdisk in terminal. A wizard will guide you in the process of recovering you files.

Make sure you support the dev of TestDisk and PhotoRec suite even before you cry for recovering your files by visiting his donation page.