Hi,

I'm helping a pharmacist friend who has lost all his data and he's willing to pay someone if they can successfully recover it. The files became corrupted during the following:
His data was on a Windows 98 FAT32 hard drive. A computer technician formatted his hard drive as NTFS and installed Windows XP on it. Apparently he intended to restore the data files from a recent backup afterwards. Unfortunately all of the backups are corrupted due to a bug in the backup software.

The dbf files were recovered off of the hard drive with a file recovery utility. But, somehow during the process these files became corrupted. When you view the dbf files you see that some of the data in the tables has hieroglyphic-like characters or in some cases it doesn't appear to be mapped to the correct fields. I anyone is interested in this job, please email me at steve (AT) ctliving (DOT) net . I'll send you a file you can work on.

The Pharmacy program he uses is at http://www.hcc-care.com/products/pharm/vis/vis_01.htm It is my understanding that this program uses Visual Fox Pro 6.

Thank you,
Steve Smith

Hi Steve,

There are commercial tools available
Recover at http://www.abri.com
FoxFix at http://www.xitech-europe.co.uk

See also
http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~NotATable~VFP
http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~Tab...epairTools~VFP
and http://www.universalthread.com -> "Download" area


hth
-Stefan

"Steve Smith" <s.w.smithREMOVECAPS (AT) ctliving (DOT) net> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:t%k4d.3897$%t3.156 (AT) lakeread01 (DOT) ..
Hi,

I'm helping a pharmacist friend who has lost all his data and he's willing to pay
someone if they can successfully recover it. The files became corrupted during the
following:
His data was on a Windows 98 FAT32 hard drive. A computer technician formatted his
hard drive as NTFS and installed Windows XP on it. Apparently he intended to restore
the data files from a recent backup afterwards. Unfortunately all of the backups are
corrupted due to a bug in the backup software.

The dbf files were recovered off of the hard drive with a file recovery utility. But,
somehow during the process these files became corrupted. When you view the dbf files
you see that some of the data in the tables has hieroglyphic-like characters or in
some cases it doesn't appear to be mapped to the correct fields. I anyone is
interested in this job, please email me at steve (AT) ctliving (DOT) net . I'll send you a file
you can work on.

The Pharmacy program he uses is at
http://www.hcc-care.com/products/pharm/vis/vis_01.htm It is my understanding that
this program uses Visual Fox Pro 6.

Thank you,
Steve Smith

Thanks Stefan. The support people who created the Pharmacy software have tried Recover, but it was unsuccessful. I tried "Advanced DBF Repair" and it also couldn't fix the data. Perhaps FoxFix might work.

Then again, we might not need it. The company that created the backup software just emailed me and they believe they have a very good chance of recovering the data from one of the corrupted backups. I'll know tomorrow.

Steve Smith

Steve Smith wrote:
damaged beyond recovery. This is actually an arguement for testing
your backups to make sure they work. I don't know how many times I have
run into those who thought they had backups and found that they didn't
because they haven't tested those backups.

--
Cy Welch
Senior Programmer
MetSYS Inc
http://www.metsysinc.com

You are exactly right Cy. It's ludicrous NOT to test backups, especially when a business depends on that data. I find it unbelievable that the computer tech who set up the backup program and says he has used this same version of backup software himself for years has never even once looked at the CD to see if backup files were even there! This is the same tech who formatted the pharmacist's hard drive. There were two hard drives in the computer and if he was too lazy or incompetent to test a backup, he could have easily moved the data to the other hard drive before formatting the drive. He was installing XP because Windows 98 had "crashed" and he thought an XP install would solve the problem. I can only speculate that he "thought" the backups were good in spite of the fact that he never tested them. He broke several rules and he cost his client several thousand dollars and a month of down time. The hard drive was even sent to the Ontrack Data labs and they aren't cheap. I hope that tech learned from his mistakes. I'm not one to put down the competition and I hope the pharmacist can figure this out on his own. This is definitely a lesson to be learned about backing up your data. Another important lesson to be learned is "First, do no harm".

The good news is that the very good people at www.backup2004.com were able to recover the backup and we have the data back. They recovered the data in spite of the fact that they don't even support the Backup2001 version anymore.

Thanks to everyone who offered to help.

Steve Smith