> > IN my last-ditch attempt to recover a long text (actually lyx) file that > > was deleted, I want to combine all of the unused space on my drive into > > files. There's about 80M altogether, and I want to break it into 10M pieces > > (so I can manipulate them in the 40M partition normally assigned for > > swap).
> > I want to get a literal straight read of the disk. Can anyone point > > out how to do this. > This is likely to be a lame answer, meaning there's probably a much > better one somewhere, but had I enough RAM, I'd configure a huge > RAMdisk, and `dd if=/dev/hd? of=<ramdisk>`, then start searching. > Alternatives to explore might be a program, pretty low level, to > read in raw sectors, maybe write it to a file, system("perl -e ...") > to search, etc, reiteratively. 20 megs of ram :) > When's your deadline with this paper, anyway? bascially, before someone submits something similar to the journals . . . > > To complicate matters, the machine has no netwerok connectivity; > > it's a laptop, and the pcmcia hardware seems to have gone south . . . > Ouch. Yop. kind of painful. I think I'll go to a journalliong file system as soon as I can manage . . . hawk