recovering overwritten file on floppy disk - corrupted zip

[jutetrea]

Hi,

Thanks in advance, but I'm really in a bind here.

I have a client who uses a small DB system that was running on NT. They wanted to upgrade due to stability issues.

They daily backup their db files to disk (small amount of data-but critical) usually 300kb for the db backup, and 50kb for the history backup.

They backed it up while I was there, no probs. Attempted to upgrade NT to XP, but partition size was too small so had to do a full install, formatted the drive from FAT32->NTFS and created one large 18gb partition, installed XP and the DB program and tried to restore the backup.

Backup didn't work. Seems that the backup process was overwriting the critical DB files with the non-critical history files - same path name a:\acsbak.zip. Stupid error, but very costly. So, we can't restore. Manually entering the data and settings would take about 40 hours of labor (building maintenance, all sorts of access lvls, elevator codes, etc).

I'm figuring it'll be hard to recover the files from the drive as its been formatted, and re-installed and NTFS.

The best bet seems to try to restore the overwritten files from the floppy but we've ran into problems. Using Active Undelete I was able to recover 10 versions of the previously overwritten file. The file runs between 250kb and 330kb. The file is unuseable through XP extract, and winzip says file is missing 50k of data (size of overwritten file).

Any help at all? This is super time sensitive, so any solutions would be appreciated.

JT

 

[bithead9]

Take a DISK image copy to another floppy. This way you have one to play with. Try PKZPFIX to "fix" the corrupted zip file. It does work sometimes. Or try using WINRAR to recover the corrupt zip file. These are a coupld of standard methods you can try first.