That's really interesting, thanks. Also, I got to know of those tools like ddrescue and the sleuthkit bunch, which I had not heard of before. Will check them o

That's really interesting, thanks. Also, I got to know of those tools like ddrescue and the sleuthkit bunch, which I had not heard of before. Will check them out, since I have some prior background in Unix sysadmin work, years ago, and in filesystem and data recovery tasks. Had only used builtin Unix tools, though, like dd, fsck, fsdb, etc. I did manage, a number of times, to recover business data for many customers, from their Unix filesystems that were thought to be unrecoverable, and often with no backups. Used knowledge of various Unix command-line tools and various tricks of the trade, some read about, some discovered by trial and error. Was good fun and learning.