Utilities Updates: Data Rescue, File Pirate and more

Data Rescue 2.01is a tool for recovering data from "lost Macintosh volumes. It recovers files and folders from crashed hard disks, floppy disks, or removable cartridges. Recovered data are saved to another medium, leaving the original disk untouched." It works with HFS Plus!

A reader reports: "After launching the Data Rescue Demo, my Mac IIcx (with Daystar '040 card) won't read floppies - no icon on the desktop, no activity on the drive at all, can't eject the disk, etc. This persists after Data Rescue is quit, and then resolves after a restart."

On the plus side: Michel Dufresne writes: "I have two 2Gb HDs which were formatted HFS Plus last February using PlusMaker. Both HD crashed the same day, three weeks after the conversion to HFS . Since then I have not been able to mount them. During the last weeks, I have tried to mount those HDs or at least recover files from them using Disk First Aid (in vain), TechTool 2.03 (in vain), then Norton Utilities b28 (in vain), then MacMedic 1.06 (was able to read the disks and create a file list, but the files in the list were all doubled, and the recovering yielded corrupted files only). For the first time today, I'm able to recover all my files successfully from my crashed HDs, using the shareware Data Rescue 2.01."

VSE File Pirate allows you to access 'hidden' resources in the files on your hard disk: pictures, icons, sounds, texts and more. You could do the same things with ResEdit, but File Pirate is much more user-friendly. A free demo version is available.

Update: We have added both Data Rescue and File Pirate to the Download Library here at MacFixIt.

Virtual PC 2.1 is out. It adds Voodoo 2 support and a few other features. The Updater is free. New copies ship with Windows 98.

NUpowr G3 v1.0.2 is out. It's the latest version of the driver software for the Newer's NUpowr 1400 G3 and the NUpowr 2400 G3 CPU Cards.

Schedule OE "allows you to have 2 recurring and 2 custom schedules for Microsoft's Outlook Express e-mail client. The program can check different accounts and control your PPP connection when checking mail."

A Better Finder Rename 1.1 is out. It's the latest update to this Macintosh Finder enhancement.

LaunchURL is a new user-contributed add-on for WestCode's OneClick. It "directly opens URLs from within OneClick macros based on the settings in Internet Config."

MacBench 5.0 is now out.