[glhart]

Norton Utilities provided a disk editor for OS 9, but discontinued it for OS X ("too dangerous"). I recently needed to pull some information off a disk and was able to use an old iMac running OS 9 and the old Norton Disk Edit to do so. Unfortunately, it does not run in emulation, and I cannot find a disk editor that searches for information on a hard disk and allows you to recover that information to a file in OS X. Is there a way to do that? It's too bad the Norton people didn't release the utility for OS X and just disable the ability to change the hard disk.

[Xeo]

I must not know what "disk editing" is but are you talking about restoring files that have been deleted from the directory structure? Try Data Rescue X.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Xeo:
I must not know what "disk editing" is but are you talking about restoring files that have been deleted from the directory structure? Try Data Rescue X.

He means directly writing to the disk itself, like for example, the catalog file or whatever. I used to do this with Norton Disk Editor to hose a disk's directories pretty good and then see how well various disk utilities could fix them. For OS X, you could probably write directly to /dev/rdiskXsY (replace X and Y with what you see when you type 'df' in the Terminal), with vi or something. It needs to be said that this is extremely dangerous, though.

If you are trying to recover data from a hosed floppy or read raw text from some disk format not recognized by OS X, I wrote a little utility that can copy the disk's raw contents to a file. Unfortunately, I've never got around to polishing the interface sufficiently well for a public release. But, if you send an e-mail to me at suppo rt@ch&a mp;#97;rles&am p;#115;oft.& ;#99;om, I could send you a pre-release copy.