[rescue] Data rescue

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

I have a friend (a PC user) who had some massive corruption on an
8 Gig IDE hard drive.  (the FAT tables got toasted).

Well, the data on the drive was not dynamic in nature... essentially
things would get stored there, then more things.

Primarily he has lots of jpeg images (cd covers, camera pics, etc).

So, on to the rescue... here is my idea... get a snapshot of the 
hard drive into a file on a Unix box, and use a program/write a program
that goes through the file 512 bytes at a time (block size) or whatever
the cluster size is (probably more efficient), and analyze the intial
bytes looking for the "signature" of a jpeg file.  If one is found, it
"recovers" a file (filename unknown).  If it doesn't see a sig it moves
onto the next block or cluster.

So, given this, any ideas if a program like this may exist (scanning
a drive for particular types of files and recovering files... can be
for unix or pc working on the drive raw or on a file image of the drive) ?

And NO, there were no backups...

Also, to make matters worse, he had a friend try Norton's on it, and let
it make changes.... it recovered lots of dirs, but the file pointers are
almost all wrong such that the jpeg images are all "busted".

This is the last chance on all this data.

I tried to make an image into a file with Linux, and it got to 2 gig
and said max filesize reached (using dd).  I don't know if that is a limitation
of VFAT filesystems where I was writing the image, or if Linux has a 2 gig
filesize limit.

Suggestions welcome.

-- Curt