FAT32 hidden within NTFS

[funward]

Hi all,

My external 1tb hard drive recently attempted suicide. I had previously split the drive about 500g/500g, half being FAT32, the other half being NTFS. On boot one terrible day, windows showed the entire disk as being RAW, obviously my partitions were gone!

I used TestDisk to search for hidden partitions and it only found NTFS, so sure enough I restored that partition, I got all my NTFS data back! yay !

However my entire 1TB HDD now shows up as being NTFS, and where the FAT32 used to be is just a whole pile of what NTFS reports as empty space. Technically the HDD has not being formatted, windows just believes the entire drive is NTFS. Somewhere hidden away is my untouched FAT32 data. The data type was .jpg / .mp4 / .mp3 (this was my music movies and pictures). Does any one have any idea what I can do to recover my FAT32 partition / files?

Cheers,

[GDH]

Hi,

Download Recover My Files from Data Recovery Software to Undelete Files; Disk recovery; Recover Deleted Files.

Run the program and close the wizard. Then click on the OPTIONS button and in the SEARCH tab change the "Type of file system to search for" to "FAT" only. Click OK, then START SEARCH, then run a Complete Format Recover on the physical drive searching ONLY for .doc, .xls, .jpeg, .wav, .zip, pdf. This should find the FAT table for your and reconstruct all files and display them in Folder View at the end of the search.

The problem you may have, is that because it is such a large disk it will take a long time to find the FAT.

You may like to try shortening the search by first clicking on the OPTIONS > ADVANCED and using the "prompt for start cluster" option to start the search further down the disk past the NTFS partition.

Good luck.

[funward]

Hi Graham,

Thanks for the advice, I'm currently running a scan with the options that you specified and using a start sector of about halfway into the drive.

Could I ask the purpose of using the default file types in the search (i.e. the .wav .doc .xls etc). Does it matter that I would only have .mp3/.avi/.jpg files on the drive?

Also in advanced options where it has 'Search in Active file areas as well as Inactive', could you please explain what this option does.

So far the program seems very impressive and I hope it finds my files. I'll let you and other members know how it turns out.

[GDH]

Hi,

The default file selection is used to locate some sample files which are then in turn used to identify the location of the missing File Allocation Table. When the FAT is found, then all files listed in bye the FAT can be located (including other file types).

If you only have .mp3/.avi/.jpg, then search only for .avi and .jpg (you can change this selection during the search by clicking on the OPTIONS > FILE TYPE tab). The reason I have not included .mp3 is that it is a very resource intensive file type to find and alalyze and on such a big drive it could slow progress down.

If the FAT is located, at the end of the search you will get the old file and folder structure in "Folder View" of the search results screen.

If the FAT is not located, you will only see "Lost Files" in "File Type View", which are the ones that have been found by their header and footer and are given names in a format like "Recovered_JPEG_1".