Database Users

Recover/Fully Delete Deleted FIles in O2 XDA II

Ok guys, you know how you can recover or fully delete files in your PC right? You can use a program like System Mechanic. System Mechanic can also do that to an external device like a digicam or mp3 player. When I say files I'm talking about pictures, videos and multimedia stuffs. I didn't back them up. I just deleted them and of course the occassional hard reset. Now I have some questions:
1. I cannot make my XDA II show as a removable device. I put it in the cradle but it's not showing up as a removable device. I was told that you have to put it in "Storage Mode" and not in "Sync Mode". Anyone who knows how to do this? Or make it appear as a removable device?
2. Do you know of any way to recover files deleted in my xda 2? or fully delete them aside from the system mechanic program?
3. Is there a way for me to reformat my xda 2?
4. When I hard reset my phone, does it delete files permanently and has no way of recovering it?
I would appreciate answers to my questions. Thanks!

your PPC makes use of RAM as a hard-drive, thus when files are deleted, they are deleted, they're not flagged as overwritable by the OS as you find with a physical HDD in a PC.

agree'd but that may not hold try for SD Cards if you just delete a file
being that sd cards have a limited number of writes before they go belly up
it would be silly to truely delete files when you delete them from the os
of cause a format should truely delete everything on the SD card

But how come my officemate was able to recover a file in his nokia phone? He used system mechanic. It showed up on system mechanic as a removable device.
Thx for the answer but I don't get what you're saying with SD cards. You mean SanDisk card right? Can u explain more?

SD == secure digital
and yes sandisk makes sd cards like they make pretty much all other
flavours of flash cards
not sure how logitech handle their systems internaly
one thing you could do to make sure that your pda really delete
the stuff is to get the program which makes your pda work
as a usb mass storage cntrl device in that case normal pc undelete programs should be able to access it like other volumes

Yeah that's what I'm trying to do. I have a system mechanic program on my PC. Unfortunately, my O2 XDA II won't show up as a removable device. ANy ideas on how can I do this?

As my first post, sorry for my bad english here. U can use softick cardexport. use googl....., and u can use as a removable device.

hhhmm..it says that it's for palm..wld it be compatible with xda 2?

Yes, you can!!!
You can do it, read here:-
http://www.ppcsg.com/index.php?showtopic=61620

that's for if you've had a piece of removable storage and the FS and/or files on the media have become corrupted (probably due to an incomplete write and bad timing) it is NOT for people who have intentionally deleted files from their card. neither is it for the PDA's on-board memory, which this guy has quite clearly killed intentionally, also mentioning that he has performed the odd hard-reset too.
secondly, just to point out a crucial aspect of your flawed logic;
if it is possible for files to remain in the memory of the PDA even after things such as a hard reset, then why is it that if you remove the battery from your PDA, then leave it in said state for about an hour (drained backup battery) the PDA will be blank after I put the battery back in?

storage card nuked wihtout warning

i just got my storage card nuked and i think it was by "save attachments on storage card" .. its cleanswept except for some attachment dir and a WMDRM dir.. anyone experienced this before?
Im curious if there is a way to save my storage card like file recovery for windows!?!? I've had smartphone for 2 years and never experienced such (nor used the mail portion) .. its really a drag if this is normal wm5 behavior.
anyways two questions:
- is a way to generally clone a qtek9100 with all regs and storage
- is there a way to recover lost files if nothing else is written to car? (so called quick formats)

sardaukar said:
- is a way to generally clone a qtek9100 with all regs and storage
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Backup apps:
SPB Backup - www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/backup/?en
Sunnysoft Backup Manager - www.sunnysoft.cz/en_clanek.php?clanekid=51
Sprite Backup - www.spritesoftware.com/pocketpc.php
Or, otherwise, copy all files over, and export the registry using Tascal Registry Editor or so. Restoring would likely be iffy, though.. e.g. overwriting the Pocket Outlook database and such - if it can be done.
sardaukar said:
- is there a way to recover lost files if nothing else is written to card? (so called quick formats)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes - there's dedicated software for this. I got one from Sandisk that came with their 1GB Ultra III compactflash card that I've got in my camera next to a 2GB memorystick.
http://www.lc-tech.com/software/rprowindetail.html

as for the nuking, I assume now it was something todo with windows mediea player and device syncronization which hadnt fully initiated ..
anyways, when you tlak of recovery what do you mean, as the link you post leads to pc software.
u put sd card in camera and mount as usb and run pc software to recover?
sprite backup seems to be very nice and feature rich.

I just had the exact same thing happen to me...was just left with the attachments directory.
The good news is that the SD card shows that there is 250MB used so i know the files are there...i just cant see them. I'm trying that SD program referenced in the last post to see if i can at least see the files.
Unfortunately, all my backups are on the SD card itself. I hadnt copied them to my HD.
wow, this is nuts - there's some serious bug lurking around!

Update on this.
I was able to recover the files with some data recovery tools. The one in this thread is useless - its meant for media files only.
I still wonder why this happened. Either way, I'm switching back Outlook attachments to main memory for a bit and see what happens.

d'oh
Well, let us know which data recovery tool you used - might come in handy for others

yup same thing happened to me... and same way, attachments on storage card
space was still missing but the files were too
didnt bother recovering though as i had backups luckily

The same happened to me twice! The first time I thought it was due to FAT FS, so i reformated it with FAT32, but it happened again.
I do have my attachements at SD, as well as I save pictures from camera to it.
BTW, the same thing happened once with my wife's iPaq 2490 (attachement at SD).
As for fixing: just use standard MS Windows checkdsk (or use Check now from drive options) if you have a card reader. It saves all files to FOUND directory (but, unfortunately, it renames it to strange names, so you'll have to find out what is what)

If this happens to you, FinalData Enterprise and EasyRecovery Pro are known to recover files very well. They will find all files and filenames. They wont restore the top level folder names but if you dont have many, you can change them yourself. More important to me were the lower level filenames and the integrity of those files.
Most of the other trial recovery programs i used couldnt do what these two products could. They typically just showed a bunch of .chk files or else tried to recover media files only.
I still want to know how this happened and if there's a way to replicate the problem. There's some nasty Outlook bug lurking around that needs to be fixed!

same thing happened to me. just realised that i have 300 meg os missing disk space that i thought had gone for ever.
can anyone recommend a freeware tool ?

Wait, my new 2gb card died 2 days ago! The Wizard won't even find it, and my PC finds it, but all the stuff on it is missing except for a couple of directories and it won't let me format it. It has to go back to China now. I'm so pissed off.
Anyone know a card recovery app?

I know the ones i mentioned earlier should work.
Someone said chkdsk may work...try that although i worry that if it recovers cross linked files (most of them are), it'll dump a bunch of useless chk files on the card.

i tried checkdisk and it didn't seem to retrieve any files. grrrrrrrrr.

Well maybe it s a bug which occurs on march 14.... because that same thing occured to my sd yesterday while I was using tt5 on the road... ;(

sardaukar said:
as for the nuking,.....bla bla.....
sprite backup seems to be very nice and feature rich.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'd choose SPB Backup. According to my knowledge the WM5 compatible version of Sprite Backup does not have the self extracting functionallity yet. (weird because that among other features made Sprite Backup stand tall above all other backup/clone solutions).
Hope they will include this self extracting feature soon.

2 GIG Mini SD Speed
Just got mine from Singapore yesterday. I did not format it as it came already formatted. I have noticed that playing video divx / mpg1's are very slow versus internal memory. I did the reg edits for cache size but found no real changes to media playback. Anyone out there playing with media playback on a Cingular 8125?

mike freegan said:
Wait, my new 2gb card died 2 days ago! The Wizard won't even find it, and my PC finds it, but all the stuff on it is missing except for a couple of directories and it won't let me format it. It has to go back to China now. I'm so pissed off.
Anyone know a card recovery app?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From experiance with this same issue on a 1gb, the card eventually starts having block failures. Fortunatly the place I bought it replaced it with another. Whatever nukes it, perminatly damaged mine. Hope in your case it didn't damage it.
I'm wondering if this is related to the reboot issue some of us are experiancing... and if it has something to do with pocket outlook or pocket windows media player 10.
Grey

Block failures are a hardware fault.
The only way you could induce one with software would be to rewrite the same location more than ~1m times, which would cause it to fail - flash has a limited lifetime, although the limit is very high.

So let me get this straight:
REGARDLESS of the BRAND of the miniSD card, the Wizard HAVE an ISSUE whereby, if MEssaging Attachement is saved to the card, the device CAN RANDOMLY nuke the card?
I haave the same issue with my ATP miniSD card (and they're considered one of the most reliable one), but instead of nuking it, it just doesn't show the file OR...worst... rename the card to "Storage CArd 2".

Depends on what people are running into.
If you're getting a corrupted card BUT you can reformat it, then it may be something with the storage card attachment thing. (I personally run with this turned on and have NOT had it happen)
If, however, the card CANNOT be reformatted - that is, its TOAST - then its NOT a software problem. The card has physically failed. Since the 2GB cards are quite new, this is entirely possible.
One other possibility - if you have a card that won't reformat first try writing a few kilobytes of zeros to it using psdwrite. If you can THEN reformat it, then the card was scrambled - it did not die.
Using "r2sd" to dump ROM images to the card has been known to interfere with reformatting to full capacity due to the internal data patterns that show up in certain places with certain ROMs. Writing a block of zeros to the front of the card will fix this, as it will wipe the data that is being misinterpreted.

All pics on SD card gone

The other day I took a whole lot of pictures and wanted to transfer them to my laptop only to discover that they were all gone. Completely! The folder still exists but there are no pictures whatsoever. Everything else on the SD card is untouched. The pictures were there before, I looked at them on the way home.
Has this ever happened to anyone else? I'm not sure what I did wrong and how this happened.
Does anybody know how to restore those pictures? I found some programs for data recovery but none of them work with SD cards inside PPCs.
Any help would be much appreciated!

try this
http://forum.xda-developers.com/viewtopic.php?t=45189&highlight=

UPDATE:
I just saw that the camera saves to the device but not to the SD car at all. Anybody know how to fix this?
Hanmin: GetBackData can't be installed on the Prophet and if I install it on my laptop there is no option to restore data on a device that's plugged in. At least I didn't find any...

This happend to me too. I don't know why. I could not recover my pictures. To allow the Camera function to save new pictures in the memory card again I had to delete the already empty 'My Pictures' folder in the memory card.
I looked at the Registry and found the paths in saveto for pictures and videos were different, I edited it to point to the memory card.

Jayxz: you're supposed to use the Data Recovery software on your PC, using a memory card reader to access the card.
You should be aware though, if you've used the card at all since the problem, you may have permanently lost your data.
You can find specialist apps to go through, sector by sector, finding jpgs etc, but if the original data is corrupted, it'll be messy.
V

X1 Calamity

Well. For some reason after using my X1 for the whole day without a hitch. I decided to give my phone a reboot at night and strangely it starts up and as soon as it hits the Today screen it just hangs and doesn't load at all.
So I try everything to removing the microsd and wow! It starts up and loads fine!
I haven't added anything on to my microsd recently and I've always been able to reboot my X1 with the microsd in it without any problem.
Any one got an idea on what is going on?
edit:
I just found out my recently called list has decided to not show names for all of my calls even though they're in the phonebook. Another issue. But hoping it could be solved without the need for another thread.

did you format your card before you used it, i didnt and it cost me my card

Well my card has always worked so I didn't see the need to format it. It was readable on my computer..

same here but then it just stopped working 2 days ago

it could be a factory defective card... try with a new card. if it happens again, start to worry
there's no reason for the X1 to kill a card if don't "format" it...

is there a 2577 folder?
Anything set to use the Card for example
PIE or opera cache?
Did you install any software (or make any changes) during the course of the day? Some software will store settings on the Card even if you don't install there.
What do you have in /windows/startup

Nope there isn't a 2577 folder.
I don't think there is anything set to use the card. Maybe only the messaging app for storing my email attachments but maybe that's all.
My startup contains:
AutoShortcut (not sure what that is to be honest)
Paneldefault
Panelmanager
Poutlook
SignatureReply(not sure about this too)

MediaPanel and storage card pics

I noticed that after I installed the R2A Rom, that the media panel is more streamlined and cleaner when it comes to pics. However it only shows pics on the device and not the storage card. Is there anyway to change this?

Just checked mine and it shows pics on my sd card... but I changed my pics location to sd via auto config, not sure if that has anything to do with it...

Shadowdh said:
Just checked mine and it shows pics on my sd card... but I changed my pics location to sd via auto config, not sure if that has anything to do with it...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Whats "auto config?"

Weird
My photos are all on my card, I know that because my phone has been hard reset 3 or 4 times in the last day.
However, after giving the media panel a couple of minutes to detect all my images, the ones from my card are all there. Infact even the images from the phone are there, but they show at the END of my memory card images.
I am running GENERIC_UK R2AA_10, however behaviour has always been the same for me since R1AA.

Auto config is a fantastic tweaking app by a chap called Schaps... (sorry about the terrible rhymying it just came out that way...) its latest version is 3.3 and can be found on the board somewhere...

I solved this problem in this way:
My picas folder is StorageSD\Pictures
So i replace "DCIM" key with "Pictures" (not "StorageSD\Pictures" !!!) in system registry.
(something about "EXTERNAL_STORAGE_FOLDER" or like)
After that all picas become viewable thru MediaPanel

On R1A rom mine displays storage card files too.