Recovering data lost between here and Mongolia

My dad returned from a trip to Mongolia past weekend. A couple of days before he went there, he had bought a digital camera (his first one) to take some pictures on his trip. And boy I have been wanting to see those pictures. When he returned and plugged the camera to his Mac, the pictures were gone, though. No one knows where they are. They were just gone. Bummer.

Of course, the camera's memory stick is just FAT formatted. From my early DOS days I remembered that FAT directory tables will still refer to deleted files. In fact, just first character (byte) of the 8 character file name in the directory table will be replaced with 0xe5 to mark it as deleted. The rest of the filename and the pointers to the actual data are still there. You can  therefore effectively undelete files from a FAT filesystem. In fact, MS-DOS at some point used to have an undelete program that would allow you to recover a deleted file. Of course you had to provide the first character of the file name again because it had been overwritten with 0xe5.

I googled and couldn't find a straight-forward (and free) solution for the Mac that would recover the data, effectively doing an undo. Doing an apt-cache search undelete on a Debian box only returned ext2 recover solutions, not ones suitable for MS-DOS. Alas, if only I had DOS 5.0!

Well, my dad's computer is in fact an Intel Mac (I'm still stuck on a PowerBook G4) and I've always been dying to try out Parallels. So I got a trial version of it, grabbed Windows XP that I had previously used within Virtual PC and installed XP in a virtual machine on the Mac. Nice. Of course, it was a big bummer to find out that XP no longer ships with the undelete program. I guess they stopped shipping that with Windows round about the same time they thought the C:\WINDOWS folder shown in the Explorer was too dangerous for people to see...

Fortunately, there are free file recovery solutions available for Windows. In fact, by simply googling I found PC Inspector smart recovery, a variant of the PC Inspector software that's designed for digital cameras and the like. Not sure what the difference is between regular disks and flash disks when it comes to data recovery. I don't care as the programs works marvellous -- it's recovering all my dad's photos as I'm typing this.

Conclusion:

• Thank God digital cameras use the (oh-so-lame) FAT file system, because otherwise it might've been much harder to recover the stuff.
  
• Parallels rocks because it puts lots of Windows-only stuff at your finger tips when you're on an Intel Mac; and as it turns out, sometimes this (oh-so-lame) Windows-only stuff can be essential when you need to solve problems.
  
• Family peace is restored. For free!