IsoBuster is intended to rescue files lost due to multiple causes, like accidental deletion, corrupted partition and virus attacks. The program supports practically any type of storage device, including optical discs, memory cards, USB drives and hard disks. Likewise, it can open an impressive list of image file extensions. It is good news that it supports not only Windows file systems (FAT and NTFS) but others as well.
The program does an excellent job of extracting contents from optical discs that are not in an optimum state. This includes playing audio from damaged analog CDs. Moreover, it has the advantage of supporting managed image files, which eliminates the necessity of extracting all the contents of a disc. The tool can also perform surface scans and mark defective blocks, which can later be filled manually.
All in all, IsoBuster provides an effective way to recover lost data irrespective of the original storage device and file system. In this respect, the program is more powerful than others. In my opinion, its main weakness is still its interface, which makes it inappropriate for inexperienced users. Moreover, I think that the tool would be complete if it allowed backing up partitions as ISO files, something that is possible with other data recoverers. The product is shareware and can be evaluated at no cost. However, some of its features are restricted, such as recovering files and viewing a sector.
v4.1 [Dec 15, 2017]
Changes / New:
Added XML style export when creating lists/reports starting from a file-system or folder
Added (Digital Forensics) DFXML style export when creating lists/reports starting from a file-system or folder
Support for MFS (Macintosh File System) which was used prior to HFS, mainly on 400KB and 800KB floppies
Support for DC42 image files, which are old style Mac floppy image files
Ability to define your own style lists/reports and create/export them from the GUI
Help (F1) now goes online and shows the online help in your browser. The help file is still installed as well and online help can be turned off in options
GUI option to display all time stamps in GMT / UTC
Improvements:
Catch PC going to sleep and wake-up messages and delay auto-finding and removing of drives for 10 seconds after waking up, so that external drives get the chance to be found again. Otherwise (overnight) scan results may be removed again when the PC wakes up (after having gone to sleep), because the drive was dismounted due to the sleep process
Do not ignore slack space between partitions smaller than 2048 blocks anymore. Assign it to a new partition for easy inspecting, searching etc.
Improved read caching mechanisms
Make sure that Main Menu text used to display loaded image file properties is translated, when the language is changed via options
Repaint block map in the Managed Image File Manager ([Professional] functionality) when F5 is clicked
Ability to select multiple blocks in the block map, to see the range it spans
Ability to select multiple blocks in the block map that is part of the Managed Image File Manager, to perform actions on that range
Keep polling blank media, because sometimes a drive reports blank media while it is still mounting the disc
Improvements setting the font in the Edit window and better support for different monospace fonts
Improved sizing of the Drive Combobox on application start, so that it works properly for all fonts and shows the items fully
Improvements dealing with inactive NTFS INDX records and test their content for duplicate files or folders
Do not automatically go deep on (embedded) folders that are listed in inactive NTFS INDX records
Optimized allocating memory for large NTFS folders
Hide raw type extraction (via right-mouse-click) on media that does not support raw
Hide the right-mouse-click extents icon when there are no multiple extents
Remove strange long waits for the right-mouse-click-popup to appear after lots of objects (especially folders) have been found
Shows ISRC in Track Properties (when available)
Check if there is enough free space before extracting files etc. and put up a dialog if there is an issue (not enough free space)
Use CD-Text (if available) for filenames when extraction audio tracks from CD
Added a plethora of new tags and commands to the existing command line functionality to export lists
Resource forks are now also always Streams, which is important to know when doing searches, exporting lists etc.
Made sure the block map also properly shows bad blocks when they fall outside the range of the blocks bitmap
Show the amount of streams and extents in the right-mouse-click popup on files and folders, if present, to easily spot the exact amount
Lots of improvements, changes and re-writes in the core code / engine, as this is a living project and to deal with the ever growing new functionality
Various other, not listed, GUI improvements
Fixes:
On huge media, e.g. >= 4TB, and under certain conditions, displaying the block map would pop-up a division by zero error
Sometimes, depending on the content, parsing NTFS would not always work correctly on 4Kn drives (drives with 4096 byte sectors)
While searching for deleted NTFS files and folders it was possible to get stuck if a deleted folder was both a child and (great) parent, causing a never ending loop
Under certain conditions, starting multiple extractions could cause memory issues on the stack, resulting into an exception error
Fix for CD-i (for RTF files for instance) where sometimes the tail end of the file would be missing (if (partially) located on 2324-bytes sectors)
Fixed it so that the block map is properly refreshed after filling gaps via the Managed Image File Manager
Fixed Access Violation while extracting a certain illegal NTFS file (freak situation: deleted, embedded, file for which fixup was not set, and only seen one case ... ever)
