PowerQuest's New "Lost &
Found" Recovers Deleted or Damaged FilesPowerQuest's New "Lost &
Found" Recovers Deleted or Damaged FilesLiving in the SF Bay Area, we all know about earthquakes. Small ones happen all the time, hardly noticeable, and the BIG one is just around the corner, the experts tell us. What can we do about it? Nothing? Probably nothing to prevent it, but plenty to minimize the consequences.
Well, I found myself in a comparable situation when the equivalent of a 5.5 temblor happened on a friend's PC: A diskette with a collection of reports became totally unusable just about the time when the reports were due, and no backup copy had been made! Hours and hours of work not just to retype but to recreate all what went into it, text and tables and references. Devastating! Catastrophic!
Asked for help, I remembered that we at the IBM PC Club Mountain View had received a review copy of PowerQuest's "Lost & Found": "The affordable, easy-to-use data recovery solution for PC users." Let's try that! I rushed to the local computer store, no, they didn't have it. Ordering on the net? A couple of days. An email to the PC Club members got an immediate response. Our evaluator hadn't had the time yet - I needed it - the next morning it was in my hands! Installation was a bit cumbersome (see below), but let's see what the otherwise unreadable diskette would reveal. After about 25 minutes of scanning, read errors and retries, all automatic, I was presented with a list of recoverable data! I copied the recovered data to a new diskette, turned it over to my friend - she was almost in tears. We were not quite sure about everything that had been on the diskette, but what we got was very helpful.
Company: PowerQuest Corporation
1083 North State Street
Orem, Utah 84057, USA
http://www.powerquest.com
Price: $70 list / $30 user group special
Reviewer: Bernhard Krevet
(Dec. 1999)
Evaluation Ratings (5 * best)
| Overall | ***** |
| Installation | *** |
| Documentation | ***** |
| Support | ***** |
| Ease-of-Use | **** |
Installation
"Lost & Found" (LF) comes on 2 diskettes and originally needed to be registered on your computer. It actually writes your computer's signature to the first diskette which you have to insert any time you start the program. I went trough the detailed process, had to retype the serial number from the disks and reboot before I got started. Somebody had mentioned that an update was available on PowerQuest's web site, which I downloaded. The update "removes the registration process which previously prevented users from installing the software on additional machines." After applying the fix, it still requires the original diskette to verify that you are not using an illegal copy. The program runs in DOS, not in a DOS window under W3.1, W95 or OS/2. The first diskette contains a copy of Caldera DR-DOS in bootable form.
Operation
Booting up from the first diskette, LF will thoroughly analyze your disk drives, all of them. Since I knew my problem was a diskette, not a hard disk, I became a bit impatient. Then a list of drives on your system is presented from which to select the troublesome. Put the diskette in A: and begin scanning. Because my diskette's FAT was unreadable, there was some confusion as to what to do when the program continued to request the source drive to be inserted. You must 'accept' the selection. The next step is the selection of the destination drive after which the actual disk analysis and recovery begins. In my case, the process took about 25 minutes, with many recoverable and unrecoverable read errors and automatic retries. I never found out what had happened to this diskette to cause such damage. Eventually, a directory tree will be shown allowing the detailed selection of files to recover and written to the destination drive. A full report is also generated.
The program includes utilities for W95/W98/NT to restore files with long filenames that are not supported under DOS. It creates a LONGNAME.BAT containing the long filenames to be run under any of the supported Windows versions to restore the files to their original names.
Documentation
The excellent User Guide is very detailed about the installation and operation. It includes sample screen images, logs to keep track of any recoveries and technical support contact listings.
Overall
The beauty of LF is that you can use it after the fact! Of course, it is still best to regularly save your data. But with friends who doesn't, I now (!) firmly believe that "Lost & Found" is a tool that every PC user should keep around. Just in case!
