Recover deleted files from a G3 (blue & white) or G4 Power Mac

[ozaz]

I'm going to be booting up an old Power Mac later in the week that has been dormant in storage for many years. Its either a blue & white g3 or a g4 (I can't remember which - its at an old workplace and I won't know until I get there). I hope to be able to find some old data files on it that I'm unable to find elsewhere. I think the OS is probably OS 9.

If I can't find the data files in the file system I want to try running a scan for deleted files (the computer has not really been used since I left that job so so I suppose there's a chance files I deleted before I left might still be recoverable).

At the time I was very much a novice with Macs and I used them for only a couple of very specific tasks. I only started using Macs properly in the last 4 years so I know basically nothing about using Pre-intel and Pre OS X Macs.

Please advise me on what software to get to scan for deleted files on these old macs?

If I need to purchase a data recovery program it would be preferable for me to buy something that I could also use with modern macs. With that in mind, I'm wondering whether a bootable CD of a modern data recovery program would boot these old macs, scan for deleted files on their internal hard drives, and copy identified files on to an external hard drive attached by usb or firewire???

Any advice would be much appreciated

 

[Hrududu]

Find yourself a copy of Norton Utilities for Mac. Go for version 7 if possible, but 6 and 5 will work with OS 9. There is a specific program included for recovering erased data. Norton Utilities is an essential element for Classic Mac OS.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

I've found that Data Rescue 2/3 and testdisk/photorec are the very best, and I've done a lot of data recovery on Macs...

 

[ozaz]

Thanks for the advice. I managed to get a copy of Norton Utilities 6 from macintoshgarden.org and it enabled me to recover a couple of useful files.

With regard to Data Rescue and testdisk/photorec, they seem to be OS X only and it wasn't obvious to me from their websites whether I could use them as a boot cd to undelete files on a g3 Power Mac.