Topic: Disk editor/File recover puzzle

[The Bar-Abbas Anomaly]

 
So my buddy ran a Windows 'Disk Cleanup' on his WinXP machine that has undergone several upgrades over the years.  He checked off the box to clean up 'Old Windows 98 and ME files' and it deleted....


EVERYTHING.  Stupid Micro$oft.

Foo.  OK, well, I can fix that.  I whip out my handy-dandy deleted file recovery tool and I was able to recover almost everything.  Almost, except for what is actually the most important - his Outlook Email database.  The file is there and recoverable, but has a  size of zero, not ~5Mb or whatever it should be.  (Nothing has been written to this HDD since the delete to avoid overwriting the deleted files)

Now, I fully believe that someone who really knows what they're doing could examine the disk (NTFS) and recover that file sector-by-sector.  But what about us?  ;-) 

My guess is that he's hosed, but I you were gonna tackle the problem, where would you start, and how could it be done?

[toasty0]

I've done that and had no problems with 3 boxes. Not sure what your buddy did, but it would seem he has other problems besides MS.

But if it makes him feel better to blame them for his accident I'm sure they have broad enough shoulder to handle it. Meanwhile, blaming them fails to solve the root cause of his error.

[The Bar-Abbas Anomaly]

I've done that and had no problems with 3 boxes. Not sure what your buddy did, but it would seem he has other problems besides MS.

But if it makes him feel better to blame them for his accident I'm sure they have broad enough shoulder to handle it. Meanwhile, blaming them fails to solve the root cause of his error.

He's not blaming M$, I am, and I trust that you're not saying that your anecdotal experience guarantees that this function operates properly on all computers in every configuration all the time....   

And at this point the root cause of the error is moot.  The root is moot!  I say.  How can I recover this one file?

[toasty0]

It means listening to the 'evil empire', but I would start here: http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx?qu=Outlook+Express+Database+recovery&View=msdn&st=b&c=0&s=1&swc=0

[toasty0]

You might try this too. This requires you to subscibe though...

http://search.experts-exchange.com/search.jsp?query=outlook+express+database+recovery&searchType=all