Pandora Recovery V1.4    Suggested by Andrew Lee - Added on 27 Jun 2007 4MB (uncompressed) - Popularity score (730) Website - Screenshot - Download - Comments (8) - Post comment - Permalink

Posted comments:

 zikarus: AntiVir detects and identifies this proggie as a virus (Trojan)... [2007-07-19 07:37]

 Sean: Yup, AntiVir sure does.
Though checking online with other virus checkers, nothing else finds anything wrong with it.
I see several references to websites when viewing it in a hex editor, some to verisign, one to pandoracorporation.com
(which redirects to pandarecovery.com)
With all it does, it almost just seems too good to be true... I'd be kind of weary of running it.... [2007-07-20 00:15]

 Mancubus: If I don't install it but simply extract and run, it says "Pandora Recovery tailed to initialize. Critical component missing. Please re-install the software and try again." and closes. If I install it, I then can run it from anywhere. Whan component may I be missing that Pandora installs? [2007-11-22 00:32]

 sentry42: It seems to require the following registry value:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PandoraRecovery]
"Anchor"=dword:000000a9

If this value is not found, the program returns the error message you saw.

I haven't had time to check if there's a workaround for this or not (but I suspect not). Maybe someone else has more time on their hands... [2007-11-22 09:49]

 Queue: You don't even need that anchor entry it seems; the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PandoraRecovery] simply has to exist. The program also auto-generates a resource DLL based on the neutral_res DLL and your local language DLL in the Lang subfolder when it's first run (creating pmres.dll) and needs an %appdata%\PandoraRecovery\Profile.xml file to exist, or for the %appdata%\PandoraRecovery folder to not exist at all (in order to properly generate it). Basically, the program has some specific needs in order to properly start up and not throw an error message about missing files.

That said, it's a pretty swanky utility. [2007-11-24 21:24]

 Mancubus: Thanks everyone for answers. I have checked your recommendations. In my case only the advice by sentry42 worked. [2007-12-24 23:29]

 Known_Issues: The free pandora recovery is not designed to be portable, you can find that out by reading content of their faq:

Can I copy Pandora Recovery from the original media to another disk drive and run it?
No, Pandora Recovery won't work on another disk drive.

Hovewer, you can purchase portable pandora recovery+flash drive (not for free, of course) on amazon.com. The advantage of the portable version is you can use it for your business, while free pandora recovery is for your personal use only. [2008-06-23 04:54]

 a: what kind of file recovery tool writes to the hard drive, wouldn't that defeat the purpose for appropriate recovery since the chances of the files beinf overwritten increase with disk writes. [2008-07-09 08:27]

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All HTML tags will be removed from your comment. URLs (http, https, ftp) will be automatically detected and hyperlinked. I reserve the right to delete irrelevant, frivolous or offensive comments. For more general topics (eg. whether apps that write to the registry, leave traces on the host machine, rely on certain versions of IE etc. can be considered portable), please post to the Portable Freeware Discussion forum. If your virus scanner has detected a virus in the application, please email the author directly or post to the forum. Note that false positives (i.e. flagging a virus when there is actually none) are extremely common for virus scanners. When in doubt, try an online scanner like Online Malware Scanner or VirusTotal, which scans files using multiple anti-virus engines. It is very likely to be a false positive if only a few engines raise the red flag.