Its a kind of Magic

Posted on Wed 29 September 2004 by alex in geek

I went to New Orleans last year and took a load of photos. unfortunately when I got back I found I could not read my cameras flash card because the crappy FAT filesystem it uses had gotten corrupted. I was very annoyed with this because visiting New Orleans was one of those "once in a lifetime" type things I'd really like to have a record of. One thing I did do however was take a bit-copy of the flash card (i.e. a copy of the device regardless of if the filesystem on it was hosed).


Yesterday in a spare moment I decided to browse Freshmeat to see if there were any FAT recovery tools. I did not hold out much hope as FAT isn't really a native Linux file format and is only really supported so people can duel boot or read floppies. However I did find a tool called Magic Rescue which is a file system agnostic rescue tool that takes advantage of the fact that files have a) magic numbers and b) generally made out of contiguous blocks. The result is I've rescued all the pictures from New Orleans and found my set from the 2003 Sea Elf Special and some pictures from (one of) Anne's graduations. I'll try and get them up on the server by the end of the week.


I spent a most pleasant evening chatting to fellow Six Feet Under fan [info]KMazzy before and after the show. Our general conclusion seemed to be they were teasing us with the promises of hot lesbian action between Claire and Edie that was ultimately unfulfilled (at least on screen). Luckily I can watch the next episode on E4 on Thursday :-)