On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Chuck Grimes wrote:
> I realize this is imbecilic to ask, but is there any recovery
> available?
I believe that in DOS, the Norton Utilities Undelete Directory command would restore this in under a minute so long as no changes had been made to the disk. My assumption is that Norton System works would do the same running under Windows.
My impression from using the Norton undelete commands is that in the x86 world, deleting (or removing) doesn't actually delete or remove. It does roughly the equivalent of removing the title from the TOC of a book and giving permission for those pages to be written over. But until they are written over, they exist in their entirety undisturbed. And there is also a trace of that the original TOC name was. So the problem of undeleting actually takes very little work.
[This trick is used by the authorities to recover lots of files people think they've deleted. To truly delete a file or subdirectory, you have to "wipe" it -- to write over it completely with new characters.]
Good luck, Chuck!
Michael