I know this is NetBSD's listserv, but I'm hoping somebody out there can 
help me with a small problem I had a few days ago with my Mac:

I'm running System 7.5, which does some funny stuff, and I uploaded a 
tar-zipped file to my Unix account for school and then placed the file in 
my trash can, after logging off my account.  I then turned off the monitor 
and left quickly for class.  I came back from class, logged in again 
(SLIP connection), went to my account, and immediately typed "rm" instead 
of "mv".  (whatever was I thinking???) so I thought:  OK, no problem, 
just pop that baby out of the trash can and... whoa!  It's not there 
anymore!

My file disappeared from the trash can without much of a trace.  
Panicking, I opened up Norton Utilities 2.0 and attempted to unerase the 
file onto another partition and drive.  It told me "100% recoverable" 
beforehand and "Recovered" afterward, but when I checked on the size of 
this new file, it was 16K instead of its original 327K.  No big deal, 
right?  So I panicked a little more (uncompressed this file is over 1Mb 
of text or so) and tried a few different strategies.  I found out that 
this file existed as two physical entries in the directory, and twice on 
the B-Trees.  However, Norton thought it would be friendly and show me 
only one of the duplicate file.  The problem is that the one it picked 
for stating 'recoverable information' was not the one that it was trying 
to recover.  A few more programs, I tried, and recovering the file, they
did not.

I took one more look at the cover of my Hitchiker's Guide (which didn't 
stop me from panicking) and went to Apple's HDSC setup program, to lock 
that partition.  After a few reboots I was able to lock the partition so 
I couldn't possibly write to it and make it any worse, then went in with 
a disk editor.  The file DOES exist on the partition, but it's fragmented 
beyond belief.  I need to figure out how to find all the fragments and 
try to fiece together what I can of the file.  It's very important to me 
and it's tar-gzipped text.

Does anybody have a nice program to do this (Norton and I aren't on 
speaking terms now) which can at least tell me how to find the file 
fragments, if not recover the file completely?  Even if I can recover 90% 
of the file, I'll be very happy.

Thanks to everybody who had the time to read this hillariously true 
story, and especially to those who can help me.  My last resort is to pay 
a fortune to have them crack open my 160Mb drive and recover the file the 
hard way, and I don't want to do that!

:(

--Rick C. Petty,  aka Snoopy
__________________________________________________________
 email: pett0019@gold.tc.umn.edu, pett0019@itlabs.umn.edu
   WWW:     http://www.itlabs.umn.edu/~pett0019/