Tao Effect Forums

I have a damaged hard drive that will not boot and I need help recovering the files on the sparseimage. I can copy the folder into another hard drive but Espionage does not recognize it. Also is it possible to unlock it from the hard drive and restore and then copy it over to a new hard drive.

Hi lan2000, please have a look at this document to get an understanding of how Espionage 2 works before continuing to read this reply:

http://www.taoeffect.com/espionage/Espi ... kings.html

So, what needs to be done is on your other (working) machine, you need to copy a folder with the sparseimage (or sparsebundle) inside of the folder, and then add that to Espionage. If your hard drive failed while the folder was unlocked, then the sparseimage (or sparsebundle) will be in the parent folder. As an example, say your folder is called Secret and is located here:

/Volumes/DeadDrive/Users/Ian/Desktop/Secret

If the folder was unlocked when the drive failed, the invisible disk image will be here:

/Volumes/DeadDrive/Users/Ian/Desktop/.Secret.sparseimage

And, the Secret folder will likely not be a folder, but a symbolic link (which you can tell because it will have a small arrow on the folder icon).

To re-import the folder into Espionage, the disk image much be inside of the folder, like this:

/Volumes/DeadDrive/Users/Ian/Desktop/Secret/.Secret.sparseimage

So, I recommend downloading and using it to make the Finder show invisible files. Then navigate to that location and see where the disk image is located. If it's outside of the folder in the parent folder, then delete the symbolic link, create a folder with the same name (in the example I'm using here, it would be called "Secret"), and move the disk image into that folder.

Once you have a folder with the disk image inside of it (of the same *exact* name, except for the period at the front of the disk image name), then copy there folder to where you want and add it into Espionage. Espionage should say that it's "Already encrypted", and then you'll just need to enter the password for that folder. If the disk image isn't corrupted, it should add to Espionage and you should be able to open it.

Hope that makes sense, let us know if you have any other questions.

Thanks for the help but the disk image was corrupt.

Hello, if the disk image was corrupt make a copy of it and try to repair it with disk utility, if that fails let me know.
Rgds
Zsolt