OK, thanks to The Coroner's Toolkit (tct) I have recovered a few files. Here's how it went, then I'll describe the next problem. Thank you for bearing with me. I used the "unrm" program to extract the first 1.9G of unallocated space. It would have done all 29G of unallocated space, but then lazarus would have had a problem with too big a file. I figure if I can manage to get the first 2G and do something with it, we'll be happy. So, that was pretty quick then I started lazarus on the 2G file last night about 11:00 p.m. I came home and checked it at about 7:00p.m. and it was still running. I checked it again at about 9 and it had finished. 29734 files! The files are in a directory called "blocks". It also generates a few HTML files that help navigate the mess. It tries to identify files as text, mail, html, c code, binary, image, and some more. The problem with modern mail is, of course, it's really hard to tell the mail from the html and the images. Be that as it may, if I could just get the mail back, it would be a start. So, I'm trying to run a perl script that comes with tct called rip-mail, which tries to make readable mail files out of the lazarus mess. When I do I get the following: linux:/home/jim/Downloads/tct-1.14 # perl ./lazarus/post-processing/rip-mail blocks/*.m.txt bash: /usr/bin/perl: Argument list too long Which I'm guessing means there are too many files from the directory. rip-mail works when I specify just one or two files. The thought of going through 29,000+ files by hand seems ludicrous to me. Plus I'm sure it's not necessary, if I only knew how to proceed. I think the rip-mail will work best if I run the list of file names, space delimited into the script. Wait, now I see that ls doesn't like this either: jim@linux:~/Downloads/tct-1.14/blocks> ls *.m.txt bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long This should be an easier problem for you linux gurus to solve. Why can't I list this directory. Remember that there are 29734 directory entries. I know because I can list the whole thing, but not with a mask. Thoughts to the list for all to learn, please. Plus that helps eliminate duplicate answers. Thanks so much, Jim