I’ve had to use this trick a couple of times the last few years, so I decided that I might as well document it:

If you have an image of a storage media (like an SD card or CD/DVD) which you can not mount (either because the filesystem is hosed – that’s a technical term for damaged beyond repair 🙂 – or because it uses some proprietary extension – *cough* MS *cough) and you know the approximate size of each file (maybe they are JPEGs or AVIs), you could adapt this script of mine.

What it does:

1. It reads $search_buffer bytes from $input
2. It looks for $header (as it is written it looks for RIFF, which means AVI or WAV usually – for JPEG you would use “xFFxD8”)
3. If it finds it, it dumps $extracted_size bytes from the given position (this should be set to be larger than the biggest file you expect)
4. It not, it seeks forward $search_buffer - length($header) (to handle the cases when the header is split by the border of the buffer)

The script is not perfect (for one it tries to load the entire file into memory before writing it out; it also doesn’t do any validation of the fileformat, thus possibly creating some garbage output), but it worked well for me in the past, so I thought I share it.

PS. If you need some more serious file recovery, you might want to look at PhotoRec and TestDisk. They are both free (as in freedom – GPL license) and seem to be great programs (I never actually managed to get them to recover more than my little cobbled together script, but I might have some very particular usecases).