scalpel carver and skipping blocks
 

Back story:
I'm working on a ~1 TB disk that was loaded with all kinds of images and documents that lost it's HFS+ partition table. The person for which I'm doing the favor of running scalpel says it's likely there's 90GB of stuff. Somehow, the disk got relabeled/MBR changed to some FAT variant that works on the whole Terrabyte.

Attempts to recover the partition info failed.

My first try with scalpel finds more than 90GB of image file headers alone and that blows through all of my storage. Of the headers found and recovered as images, a simple test shows most of the image files are broken. The cluster size option does not work if I use it by itself. It errors out before it gets going.

Problem:
I want to speed things up and skip the countless broken image files. Does anyone know if the skip option will help my situation?

What did you use for trying to recover the partition table? Testdisk has been my tool of choice and I've had good success with it.

As for image and file recovery, I typically stick to Photorec (part of the testdisk suite) and foremost. photorec seems to do a pretty good job of piecing images back together.

Yeah, testdisk was a non-starter. Maybe the HFS+ file system recovery magic isn't perfect.

I'm running foremost now and will try photorec if my disk fills up again.

I'm still wondering if there's anyone that knows the benefits/tricks of the skip option

To be honest, I've never heard of scalpel (can you post a link, because I can't seem to find it either). At first I thought it was a clone of foremost, but it may not be.

I was going to recommend foremost, because it does tend to recover intact files (there is an option to recover broken files as well).

I think you have the right idea TexmeX. Scalpel: http://www.digitalforensicssolutions.com/Scalpel/