[pchadwic]

A tech support client of mine has somehow rendered their only copy of all their business files unreadable. They attempted to backup their files in OS 9 by dragging them to an external 300GB FW drive (Maxtor) several months ago. Now, when attempting to open them on OS X (or OS 9 I believeÑneed to confirm that) we are confronted with the majority of the files having been split into data & respource forksÑunable to be recognized by the Finder or the apps that created them. Only the files with an extension were OK (.jpg, etc). Most of them did not have an extensionÑthey are VectorWorks files and within a given folder you see filenames with the UNIX executable icon, a FINDER.DAT file, and a folder named "RESOURCE.FRK" Inside this folder are files named with the first several charactors of the files they apparently were seperated from, ending with "~1" and no extension. These have the same UNIX executable icon.


Here's an example:
Folder name is: #Old Accounts

file:
/#Old Accounts/97 APD Partners Account

Within that folder is:

/#Old Accounts/RESOURCE.FRK/97APDP~1


I'm wondering if the drive was formatted in HFS instead of HFS+...would that account for this happening? Is there any way to reassemble these files? The originals are GONE.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by pchadwic:
I'm wondering if the drive was formatted in HFS instead of HFS+...would that account for this happening? Is there any way to reassemble these files? The originals are GONE.

That's a typical symptom of copying files to a DOS/Windows formatted drive or server. Try giving some of the damaged files the proper file extension and see if they open. It's uncommon that files for modern applications actually contain any important data in the resource fork so they will likely open just fine. The hard part will be determining what the original file names were.

[CharlesS]

Sounds like the hard drive may have been formatted in a non-Mac format such as FAT (the MS-DOS file system).

Since OS 9 and OS X use different methods of encoding resource-fork files on non-Mac disks, I think the easiest way to get the files back would be to boot into OS 9 and copy the files from the hard drive to a Mac-formatted drive from there.