Sunday, April 29, 2007

Corrupted Data

No, no, not mine. Someone elses. Someone I know was given a corrupt database file and told to retrieve as much data as possible from it. If she tried to use the database file with its usual application (called Exist), then it would refuse to read much of the data as the file was corrupt.

Thankfully the software is open source. She downloaded the code to her personal machine, used a debugger to find the lines that were detecting file corruption, changed them so that they silently failed (permitting the application to continue reading from the file), and suddenly she was able to read all the data!

Very proud of her for what she achieved. :) First, she saved some people a lot of work to regenerate that data. Second, she used sophisticated debuggers to locate and create a solution. Third, this method of handling corrupt files in Exist is now one of her contributions to other developers like herself.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

=:)

Anonymous said...

Thank God it wasn't your thesis that was corrupted.

Being computer illiterate, I am not sure if that (corrupted thesis) is possible or not.

Anyway, if it happens, you know someone who can help.

Anonymous said...

My computer's hard drive get corrupted and it become very critical to manage my business finally i approached data recovery service to get out of this problem.

Petter Smith
http://www.hdrconline.com