CentOS - May 2013 - Need a Centos 6 USB hard drive recovery procedure

My 15GB backup USB drive somehow got "corrupted" such that
a "chkdsk /f E:" on WinXP removed the file allocation table
(or whatever) making the NTFS drive appear empty.

I tried Windows Recuva freeware to recover the files, and
it has been working for 24 hours; but it has dumped about
65,000 files into a separate flat Windows directory.
 http://www3.picturepush.com/photo/a/12892041/img/12892041.jpg

Since none of the files were deleted or written over, is
there a method on Linux that will simply recover the missing
file allocation directory structure instead of dumping a 
hundred thousand files into a single directory?

On 5/9/2013 1:41 PM, Rock wrote:
> Since none of the files were deleted or written over, is
> there a method on Linux that will simply recover the missing
> file allocation directory structure instead of dumping a
> hundred thousand files into a single directory?
the FAT contains all the file linkage.   if it was overwritten, then 
there's no file structure left at all on the disk.



-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast

> For the record, this is the Microsoft Support KB I had followed:
>  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/176646
Just by way of update, it's currently at 95,000 of about
100,000 files; so I would expect the Recuva file recovery
to complete by tomorrow morning (day 3):

 http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/12901188/img/129088.gif

Of course, the results will be flatter than a pancake; so, 
I will try the other suggested methods; but at least I'll 
wait for this first (Recuva) method to complete.

On 05/09/2013 04:41 PM, Rock wrote:
> My 15GB backup USB drive somehow got "corrupted" such that
> a "chkdsk /f E:" on WinXP removed the file allocation table
> (or whatever) making the NTFS drive appear empty.
>
> I tried Windows Recuva freeware to recover the files, and
> it has been working for 24 hours; but it has dumped about
> 65,000 files into a separate flat Windows directory.
>   http://www3.picturepush.com/photo/a/12892041/img/12892041.jpg
>
> Since none of the files were deleted or written over, is
> there a method on Linux that will simply recover the missing
> file allocation directory structure instead of dumping a
> hundred thousand files into a single directory?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
I had to recover a Red Hat Raid array after a motherboard failure...

This did it:
http://www.recoverdatatools.com/

During the recovery it rebuilt the previous Windows installation as 
well.  It not free but it worked for me several years ago.

Hope it helps.  There are some linux solutions I had at the time and I 
am trying to dig up my notes.

Fred