cgsecurity.org

I've got a drive that used to do some back up of photos and such for a couple of Mac devices. I ran photorec and it fetched a bunch of junk files and a 55GB .diskimage file. I've been searching around and cannot seem to find a way to get into the .diskimage file or how to extract anything from it. Any tips or pointers?

Thanks!

The signature for .diskimage file is only 4 bytes. It's prone to false positive.
Does PhotoRec recover some of your jpg files or none ? If no files have been recovered, it may be due to HFSX compression.
If compression is used, you will have to find another file recovery program specialized for Mac OS X that can handle it.

Thanks, I had a feeling it was a false positive, but so far it is the only non-junk file that I've pulled. Any recommendations on Mac recovery programs (free preferred)?

I also got a couple of .diskimage files from running PhotoRec over a defunct HFS+/OS X partition. The .diskimage files are many megabytes in size but don't seem to be in any useful format. So I assume these might probably be false positives, too.

Do I need to be worried about useful items, e.g. JPEGs, being contained within the .diskimage files?

I.e. will PhotoRec be unable to recognize the start of e.g. a JPEG file if it thinks it has found the beginning of a .diskimage file in a previous sector?

If so, it would probably be better for me to disable .diskimage files altogether before starting the recovery. Are there other "weak" file types like .diskimage (files types prone to false positives which might shadow "better" files) that I should deselect right along with .diskimage?

Thank you very much @cgrenier, for your great work and support!!!

A diskimage signature should not prevent the recovery of a jpg. You can disable this file format but as I previously post, the problem may be related to HFS+ compression.

Thank you very much for your quick reply and for confirming that one does not need to disable the .diskimage type if the recovery of JPEG files is desired!

(FWIW I am not the person who created this topic, just someone else who also got .diskimage files. HFS+ compression was not being used in my case, and PhotoRec already recovered some hundred thousand JPEG and CR2 files for me, so I am a very happy camper — I was just wondering if more image files might be "hidden" inside of the .diskimage files that PhotoRec created for me.)