Patent Grant
9213606
The present invention relates generally to the field of retrieval and recovery of information and particularly to rapid and efficient retrieval and recovery of information stored in a mass storage device, which is accessible or inaccessible to an operating system.
In modern electronic systems, storage, retrieval, and recovery of digital information plays a significant role in the operation of devices included within such systems. A common example of an electronic system is a personal computer (PC), which requires access to digital data for processing thereof to perform and execute a wide variety of tasks. Digital data may be stored in a PC either internally as in a hard disk or externally in a mass storage data device such as a digital photo reader or a compact flash reader device.
In the conventional methods of accessing digital data, as implemented in electronic systems, an application program operating under a standard commercially available operating system accesses a mass storage data device for reading and/or writing of digital data. The operating system recognizes the mass storage data device and “mounts” it as an operating system data volume, i.e., a “disk drive”. The application program thereby accesses the mass storage data device at the logical level within the operating system using the operating system formatting information included within the mass storage data device.
However, the conventional methods of accessing digital data have a limitation that is encountered when the mass storage data device is for some reason corrupted. In the event of corruption of the mass storage data device, the electronic system cannot recover the digital data simply because the operating system is unable to communicate with the mass storage data device. Another limitation of the conventional methods of accessing digital data is that the application program commands the mass storage data device only with standard commands available to the operating system.
In light of the foregoing, it is desirable to develop a method and apparatus for accessing digital data even when the mass storage data device is corrupted and the operating system cannot communicate therewith. Further, the method and apparatus should not interfere with normal operations of the operating system, i.e. be transparent to the operating system. The desired method and apparatus should be able to access, retrieve, and recover information efficiently and cost-effectively.
Briefly, an embodiment of the present invention includes an image rescue system having an application program for communication with a mass storage device, said application program being in communication with an operating system layer for accessing said mass storage device to read and write information. The image rescue system further includes a device driver in communication with said application program, said operating system layer and said mass storage device, said device driver for allowing said application program to access said mass storage device to read and write information by bypassing said operating system layer, said device driver for communicating with said mass storage device to allow said application program to rapidly access information in said mass storage device considered damaged by said operating system layer, said damaged information being inaccessible to said operating system layer, wherein said image rescue system accesses said mass storage device to rapidly and efficiently retrieve and recover information accessible and inaccessible to said operating system layer.
The foregoing and other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments which make reference to several figures of the drawing.
The present invention employs a technique for directly accessing common mass storage data devices at the physical, rather than logical, device level; without assistance from operating system programming facilities. This allows for recovery, reconstruction and retrieval of valid user data files from a mass storage data device that the operating system would normally consider a “damaged” or corrupted mass storage data device.
The present invention allows the operating system to be extended to support the addition of an external mass storage data device to be added to the operating system as a standard system data volume or what is commonly known as a “disk drive”. An application program in concert with a device driver for the mass storage data device allow for rapid retrieval of what appears to be to the operating system “lost” or corrupted data from the mass storage data device.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the “mass storage data device” for which the application and driver is designed is Lexar Media, Inc. brand compact Flash cards connected to a personal computer (PC) or a Macintosh computer (Mac) via a universal serial bus (USB) 1.x connection via a Lexar Media brand Jumpshot cable. The application is not limited to this type of mass storage data device or this type of connection to the computer. The techniques described below will work for almost any mass storage data device, any storage technology, which is connected to the host computer in almost any way.
As will be explained in further detail with respect to
Referring now to
The PC 12 is shown to include an application program 16, which is in communication with the operating system layer 18 through an application program interface 22. The operating system layer 18 is shown to be in communication with a driver 20 through an operating system input/output (I/O) interface 24 and a driver I/O interface 32. The driver 20 is shown to include an access interface 26, which causes direct communication with the device 14 through a hardware interface layer 28 and the hardware bus 30. As shown in
In various embodiments of the present invention, the hardware bus 30 conforms to different standards and is thus referred to as a different interface. Examples of the different types of hardware bus 30 are USB, PCMCIA, IDE, mass storage interface, fire wire and blue tooth.
In prior art methods, the application program must communicate through the operating system layer to the driver. The problem with such prior art methods is that in the event of some sort of corruption of the device 14, the system can not recover the device simply because the operating system is unable to communicate with the device. In the present invention however, the driver 20 identifies the device 14 and recovers the information previously stored in the device even though the device 14 includes corrupt information. It should be noted that different drivers 20 are employed for different types of devices that device 14 can be. Similarly, the access interface 26 includes different extensions based upon the kind of device employed as device 14. Bypassing the operating system layer 18 enables establishing communication with devices, as device 14, that the PC 12 is not able to communicate with if the operating system layer 18 is not bypassed.
Referring still to
The technique employed searches for certain data file types that have distinguishable data “headers”. The “header” area includes data patterns that are unique to certain file types, for example, but not limited to, joint photographic experts group (JPEG) files or tagged image file format (TIFF) files. The application program also utilizes information gathered from the mass storage data device to formulate an algorithm to allow for an intelligent search of the mass storage data device instead of a “brute force” byte-by-byte search. The application program first directly queries the mass storage data device for its device characteristics using the access technique described hereinabove. This information is used to establish the absolute size in bytes of the device 14 along with obtaining its physical block size.
The physical block size, described in units of bytes, is the smallest unit of access that can be read or written to the mass storage data device. This unit is usually described as a binary multiple of a number of bytes, usually in the range of hundreds or thousands of bytes. The application will then attempt to read the operating system formatting information on the mass storage data device. This information is operating system dependent, the application knows what operating system it is running under and interprets the data accordingly. Since the formatting data may be damaged or corrupted, the application program attempts to determine if the formatting information is valid by examining certain operating system specific parameters contained within the formatting information for reasonable values.
Knowing that the operating system will only write file data in units of file allocation unit sizes, the application program searches for pertinent file header information 43 at the boundaries of these units; at the very most, the file allocation unit 41; at the very least the physical block size 42 of the mass storage data device.
This, therefore, will substantially increase the speed of the search as opposed to a byte-by-byte search on the mass storage data device. It is only necessary to examine the beginning of the search allocation units for the file header information 43. If no match of header information is found, the search algorithm skips to the beginning of the next search allocation unit on the mass storage data device. This process is continued until all areas on the mass storage data device have been examined.
Although the present invention has been described in terms of specific embodiment, it is anticipated that alterations and modifications thereof will no doubt become apparent to those more skilled in the art. It is therefore intended that the following claims be interpreted as covering all such alterations and modification as fall within the true spirit and scope of the invention.
This application is a divisional of U.S. application Ser. No. 11/654,290, titled “IMAGE RESCUE,” filed Jan. 16, 2007 now U.S. Pat. No. 8,166,488, which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 10/371,930, filed Feb. 21, 2003, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,231,643, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional application No. 60/359,510, filed on Feb. 22, 2002, each of which is incorporated by reference in their entirety.
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| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20120204192 A1 | Aug 2012 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60359510 | Feb 2002 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 11654290 | Jan 2007 | US |
| Child | 13451594 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 10371930 | Feb 2003 | US |
| Child | 11654290 | US |
