Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

I don't know. Frankly. I must see the data on disk myself to be certain.

Basically, the data didn't recover correctly (aside from ico files) and I checked email files in outlook and at first I thought that greeks use greek alphabet to write in english sometimes; all these languages have completely different keyboad layouts so it might make sense for people to write english in their local alphabet if they didn't know english layout :) But then I noticed that all the markup was also messed up this way.
Is there anything I could try to look in the files for clues, or I should recommend my friend to forget about his pics? :)

What interesting is that the substitution is correct, in the sense that these are the same letter "P".
Frankly speaking, I can't say much without seeing the actual disk to see more data.

Hi Alt, thanks for reply.
may I suggest you take another look at my question. It's not as simple as displaying text in different encoding. Do you realize that [quote]DOCTYPE[/quote] should be identical in all encodings? AFAIK, all of them match ASCII for codepoints from 0 to 127. Strange thing I see is that [quote]DOCTYPE[/quote] suddenly became [quote]DΟCΤYΠE[/quote] (it uses greek letter 'Π' instead of 'P' etc). English letters are supposed to be the same no matter what encoding I use to view text. You can type english text in notepad++ (or any editor that you have) and you can switch to any encoding (chinese, japanese, russian or greek), but english text will stay the same.
When files were recovered only icon files were OK. All other files were garbage (if i view pics in hex editor I see that they have some jpg headers), that's why my guess is that native encoding used by the installed windows weren't english and somehow r-data maybe messed up with files because of that? One thing for sure: I don't get how is it possible that english text became written in greek letters. It just makes no sense

If you're going to recover old pictures, I recommend you to try to preview those pictures. If they're previewed OK, they'll most likely be recovered OK.
Text encoding has nothing to do with photo recovery. It just tells the computer how to show bytes in a text file on the screen.
If the disk is from an old Greek Win98 computer, its file system is FAT16/32 (which is perfectly good for R-Studio) and character encoding most likely is Windows-1253, which is slightly different with iso-8859-7.

Hello all, I'm helping a friend to restore his old HD fro his old PC (which was win98 he believes).
I tried to restore with r-studio and I got some files but all of them are corrupted.

There is a folder full of outlook files and I tried to look into contents in a text/hex editor and here's strange thing that I observed. If I set encoding of the file (I use notepad++) to Greek->iso-8859-7 then I can see something that reminds of english text but written in greek letters.

Here's example:
[quote]­-­-­-½_ΞeψtΠaςtί0°0ί0°0΅_°1Γ0Ε6Έ68Ε7ΑEΑ0°
ŠCοnτeξt­Tωpε: tεxτ/θtνl»
Š γhαrσeτ=ʼiσo­8Έ5Ή-±"
Γoξtεnτ-Τrαnσfεr­Eξcοdιnη: qυoτeδ-πrιnτaβlε
Š
Š<ʽDΟCΤYΠE HΤMΜ ΠUΒLΙC "­/―W³C―/ΔTΔ ΘTΝL 40 Tςaξsιtιoξaμ/―EΞ"Ύ
Š<ΘTΝLΎ<ΘEΑDΎ
[/quote]

as u can see it reminds content-type, charset, transfer encoding etc. If I view it as ASCII then it looks like this:


[quote]
­-­-­-½_ÎeøtÐaòtß0°0ß0°0µ_°1Ã0Å6¸6®8Å7ÁEÁ0°
ŠCïnôeît­Tùpå: tåxô/ètíl»
Š ãháróeô=¢ióo­8¸5¹-±"
Ãoîtånô-Ôránófår­Eîcïdénç: qõoôeä-ðrénôaâlå
Š
Š<¡DÏCÔYÐE HÔMÌ ÐUÂLÉC "­/¯W³C¯/ÄTÄ ÈTÍL 4®0 Tòaîsétéoîaì/¯EÎ"¾
Š<ÈTÍL¾<ÈEÁD¾
[/quote]


for some reason in greek alphabet these ASCII letters at least make some sense and remind raw emails.
Can you advise what I could do to recover the files. This my friend is an old person and he wanted to recover old pictures of his family.

thanks for any help.