[C#] HDD died, .net reverse eng.

[sathenzar]

So my hdd died yesterday. My previous backup around 2 months old. Is there anyway to use my assemblies/debugger files generated to reverse engineer my code so I don't have to re-write everything? This whole thing has been a nightmare.

EDIT: I'm using .net 4.0 and WPF/C#.

[Arceles]

I think is better for you to pay for a recovery data service....

[firey]

  On 01/09/2012 at 23:34, sathenzar said:

So my hdd died yesterday. My previous backup around 2 months old. Is there anyway to use my assemblies/debugger files generated to reverse engineer my code so I don't have to re-write everything? This whole thing has been a nightmare.

EDIT: I'm using .net 4.0 and WPF/C#.

Could use Reflector and dump it that way.

[Osiris]

Depending on the cause of the failure, you can try the freezer trick or using spinrite. As I said depends on the cause of the failure, imo for home users data recovery services are not feasible as they often are not the target market and often depending on how the drive has died they can be just as limited as to what they can do.

[Stephen Veteran]

http://www.jetbrains.com/decompiler/ can be used to decompile your assemblies,

Note: always use sourcecontrol, you would have kept the source if it was hosted somewhere

[sathenzar]

I might point out the hard drive that failed was a pci-e revo drive setup in raid 0. But thanks for the jetbrains idea I'll look it up. Really I want the code, I can always re-construct the xaml if I need to. This whole thing has just been a nightmare. My last copy is so many thousands upon thousands of lines of code behind.

[sathenzar]

Ok so that worked in a way (the program you gave me), however it renamed all of my variables in their own scope (I have a billion variables lol). Is there anyway to save the variable names or is that something the compiler does when converting to IL code and such?

[Stephen Veteran]

  On 02/09/2012 at 15:56, sathenzar said:

Ok so that worked in a way (the program you gave me), however it renamed all of my variables in their own scope (I have a billion variables lol). Is there anyway to save the variable names or is that something the compiler does when converting to IL code and such?

the variable name isnt saved when changed to ILcode, it is only saved if the member is public.

[sathenzar]

Yeah that's what I figured. It had been a while since I studied the process of the compiler to IL code but I couldn't remember if it renamed the variables that were private or not. I think it does that for faster processing if I'm not mistaken. Oh well, either way I just started re-writing everything *sigh*. This time I will have several back ups :) I lost about 20,000 lines of code.

[Stetson]

  On 02/09/2012 at 15:06, sathenzar said:

I might point out the hard drive that failed was a pci-e revo drive setup in raid 0.

You were storing the only copy of your source code on RAID 0? :s

[sbauer]

  On 15/09/2012 at 18:14, sathenzar said:

Yeah that's what I figured. It had been a while since I studied the process of the compiler to IL code but I couldn't remember if it renamed the variables that were private or not. I think it does that for faster processing if I'm not mistaken. Oh well, either way I just started re-writing everything *sigh*. This time I will have several back ups :) I lost about 20,000 lines of code.

Backups are nice, but you really should be using version control. It's not just for projects with multiple developers. Bitbucket is free. Backups taken care of.

[sathenzar]

  On 15/09/2012 at 18:45, sbauer said:

Backups are nice, but you really should be using version control. It's not just for projects with multiple developers. Bitbucket is free. Backups taken care of.

Lol yeah I know. Pretty dumb. It wasn't ALL of my projects. Just one I had started on and just ran out of space on my back up hard drives and thought oh well this is a brand new hdd I'll back it up in a couple of weeks. Well the week before I was going to buy a new one the new hdd died lol. Lesson learned.

[ffMathy]

Have you tried harddrive recovery software such as R-Studio? It's the same software the feds use to recover deleted data.

[wrack]

1) Try software based recovery solutions.

2) Try DECOMPILER such as JustDecompile from JetBrains or Reflector from RedGate

3) Try hardware based recovery solution if the cost if worth it (Keep in mind, this method is a destructive to the disk, you will not get the original disk back).

[pes2013]

  On 26/11/2012 at 10:12, ffMathy said:

It's the same software the feds use to recover deleted data.

Source for that statement?

[n_K]

  On 26/11/2012 at 10:12, ffMathy said:

Have you tried harddrive recovery software such as R-Studio? It's the same software the feds use to recover deleted data.

Haha, no it's not.

Feds use encase, winhex and that other one of which the name slips me buy, fx toolkit or something.

EDIT: FTK, not tx toolkit.

[XerXis]

if you didn't obfuscate your code you should be able to get it completely back using a decompiler. .net Reflectoris the best, although not free. Even if some variables are renamed it's a metter of refactoring, still a lot faster than starting again from scratch.

And remember, 0 in raid-0 stands for the amount of files you can recover when a drive fails ;)