Some time last year, Mum handed me one of her CF cards that supposedly had photos from my parents’ trip to Lisbon on. I poked and prodded gently, but couldn’t see any photos that matched that description. I made an image with dd, and handed her disk back – with the intent of trying to get a DOS VMware image up, and present the image of the CF card as a drive so I could use the old undelete tools in DOS (the CF card is formatted with FAT16). This plan didn’t work too well, VMware didn’t want to make the image available as a drive that DOS could see. I tried replaying the image back onto one of my CF cards (same size), but couldn’t get my PCMCIA or USB adapters to show up in DOS.

Earlier I wrote about TestDisk (which saved me hours of work on the CEO’s machine). The other tool made by the same guy is PhotoRec, and it does exactly what it says on the tin! I’ve taken the replayed CF card, jacked it in to Windows and told PhotoRec to search the entire disk. It’s pulled off 350ish files, though they’re not all from the Lisbon trip. At least 5 are from several years ago when we went on a cruise through the Panama Canal. PhotoRec is now another tool that will be staying on my Kubuntu stick (and in memory, in case I wipe the stick :).

I think Mum will be happy :)