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I have an old external hard drive, some of the folders appear as "binary" work files and can't be opened (some other folders do not have problem).

The HD: Filesystem type: msdos

Concerned folder appear as:

Type: Binary (application/octet-stream)

I'm using linux ubuntu. How can I recover it?

Dadep
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    What is the filesystem? Please [edit] and provide more details (output of `ls -l` in the parent directory, `file troublesome_file`). – Kamil Maciorowski May 06 '21 at 10:31
  • @KamilMaciorowski I edit the post thanks! – Dadep May 06 '21 at 10:39
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    This looks like a very old DOS disk. Try to use it on Windows, or on Linux you could try [WINE](https://wiki.winehq.org/Main_Page). – harrymc May 09 '21 at 08:48
  • This looks like a virus, when original files and folders moved to a hidden folder, and binary files were created in their place. check your files with an antivirus or upload them to virustotal – zersh May 09 '21 at 17:04
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    @harrymc I previously try on a windows computer (from friend, I do not have access anymore) It was the same problem – Dadep May 09 '21 at 17:25
  • @zersh Some folders on the same disk work well without any problem, just few of them got this strange this strange problem... – Dadep May 09 '21 at 17:27
  • and if you open such a folder with text editor,, what will it have in the headers? the first 10-20 lines – zersh May 09 '21 at 20:59
  • What is the names of these folders/file? – harrymc May 10 '21 at 07:42
  • @zersh I got something: 0\00\A4a\A1L9\92;W\00.\91\92;\DCK\00\00\00\00.. \00\A4\00\91\92;\92;\00\00\00\91\92;\00\00\00\00\00\00A.\00D\00S\00_\00S\00\00\CDt\00o\00r\00e\00\00\00\FF\FF\00\00\FF\FF\FF\FFDS_STO~1 "\00\B2f\A1L9+?W\00\B7\B1:pQT\00\00A.\00_\00.\00D\00S\00\00\A7_\00S\00t\00o\00r\00e\00\00\00\00\00\FF\FF_~1 DS_"\00\B2\00\91\92;+?W\00\00\91\92;oQ\00\00\00B5\000\00 \00A\003\00\00.\00p\00d\00f\00\00\00\FF\FF\00\00\FF\FF\FF\FFa\00f\00f\00i\00c\00\00h\00e\00_\00e\00p\00s\00\00\00_\001\00AFFICH~1PDF \00\B59l79+?\EB\009l79\91\8B½K\00B_\001\005\000\00 \00 etc... I – Dadep May 10 '21 at 10:09
  • @harrymc, some regular names (in french, without accent or special charaters) like "DocumentMoisAvril", "Copie Clef USB", etc... – Dadep May 10 '21 at 10:11
  • Is it possible that these are encrypted files? I would guess that at least "Copie Clef USB" is a TrueCrypt folder. If that's indeed the case, it would be impossible to decrypt without the key. – harrymc May 10 '21 at 17:07
  • @harrymc No I called it this way. I was working fine few years ago. I just do not use it for long time and now I have this problem. – Dadep May 10 '21 at 17:10
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    If it wasn't like that before, then the next guess is that disk is corrupted. See [recovery products](https://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-data-recovery-file-undelete-utility.htm). – harrymc May 10 '21 at 17:12
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    Since it is so old it should be no so wide: create an image on your HDD. Then you can try to mount it and investigate without risking to increase damages on your old HDD. I'm afraid you can face some physical failures. Among the attempts you can try to mount the image on DOSbox, VirtualBox... if it worked under pure DOS you can always use a DOS virtual machine and mount the file as virtual HDD. Under which system did it work? – Hastur May 10 '21 at 18:33

1 Answers1

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If you want to be sure not to lose your data, create a backup of the source device first.

Try the following command in the Linux terminal:

sudo apt-get install dosfstools
sudo dosfsck -w -r -l -a -v -t /dev/xxxx

xxxx is the partition you want to check.

  • -w means write to disk immediately.
  • -r means to do disk check interactively (ask you what to do to when encountering errors). On newer versions of dosfsck this is the default.
  • -l means to list the filenames processed.
  • -a means automatically fix errors. Do not use it, if You want to have more control over fixing possible errors.
  • -v means verbose mode. Generates slightly more output.
  • -t means mark unreadable clusters as bad.

You can find other solutions/tools here - https://askubuntu.com/questions/147228/how-to-repair-a-corrupted-fat32-file-system/147237#147237

Mauricio Gracia Gutierrez
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