Drive image in .dat format?

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kozman

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Hi Gang,
I am trying to undelete files from an image of a hard drive. I imaged it months ago and was trying various softwares at the time. Now I have a 13 GB image file that has an ".dat" extension and I cannot remember what software I used.
I am looking for the imaging software that saves files in the".dat" format or an undelete program that will read this image and retrieve files.
Peace,
kozman
 
Thanks Achean,
One of these sites lead me to DriveImage XML. Could be the program I used. I see that this program leaves two files when done imaging, xxx.dat and xxx.xml. I only have one of these files, the .dat file. I must of deleted the .xml file somehow unknowingly.
I am not sure what to do now. I emailled support at DriveImage XML to see if I can do anything.
Peace,
kozman
 
Well I did get a response and it is they do not have support for the free personal version of DriveImage XML. They did email me several links to help forums. So I will report here if I find an answer for my issue.
Peace,
kozman
 
Well I found a solution to my issue. I found the program “Active@UNDELETE Pro” helped me out.
I had to start the program. Navigate to tools/disk image/open in the pull down menu. There are two options there to load an image. First one is “load…”, the second is “add”. If you select “load” a requestor comes up to search for a file. The only file type is *.dim which is the format this program can image a file into. There is no “All Files” in the “Files of type”. I could not open a regular *.iso file.
The second option is to “Add” image chunks. Here I was able to load in the *.dat image file I have. I even split up that 13 GB *.dat file into four files using GSplit. Program and I could add each one at a time. In this Open Disk Image requestor the third area in to input the Disk Image Properties. Here are the input boxes: Image Type (Physical Device or Logical Drive {partition}, Name, Bios Name, Bytes per Sector, Sectors per Tracks, Total Sectors, and Set Default. I tried loading in the image without setting these settings. The image did not load. Trying again I pressed the Set Default button and the program input the values for bytes, sectors and total. I had to select the Logical Drive option not the Physical Device option.
I was able to load the image into the program!!! Even when I loaded the “chunks” they combined and opened in the program as one.
It is safe to say this program worked. I cannot tell you what the percentage of files it recovered but I think it did well.
Peace,
kozman
 
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