I have a slightly different scenario and would need help.
A mate's pc crashed (it was on Windows 7), the file system (NTFS) is half corrupt, so the HDD itself won't boot or be recognised by other PC. I extracted the HDD and connected to a working PC with a USB-SATA cable.
With a data recovery tool I reconstructed the file system and tried to recover the critical wallet.dat file. I can get the entire dir out but wallet.dat seem corrupt (the file opened in an HEX file shows all zeros, seem totally empty).
How would I run this tool to scan the crashed HDD in search of these key traces?
By putting a linux distro on a CD/flash drive, then boot it and run the tool.
The hard disk crashed is now an extranl drive of a working PC with Windows XP.
It is NOT recognised by the OS, so probably alsso linux will not be able to see it properly.
Only data recovery tools (like ZAR which I used) can reconstruct the File system on the crashed hdd by reading data in fragments and recovering them. I was wondering if this wallet recovery tool can do something similar or needs a drive mapping (which cannot be done due to the crash) to start with...
Also: can anyone recommend any small linux distribution which can fit on a USB drive and work with this tool?
I don't have a cd reader on that PC.
This tool ignores whatever filesystem there is. It just reads it raw. It reads it as if the whole disk is just one big file. You don't need the disk to be mountable.
You can use System Rescue CD, it comes with all the tools you'll need.
Feel free to email me or PM me; i can help you through.