Recovery from a formatted disk

I occasionally receive disks that are perfectly valid, with intact files and file system. However, the history of them is that they have been reformatted,and the original files lost. To make things slightly worse, the file system may have been changed. Thus an original FAT32 disk couldnow be a NTFS or the other way around.

To help detect this, CnW Recovery software has a function on the partition scan that will count the number of MFTs (for NTFS) or directory clusters for FAT disks. It will often be clear at the end of the scan if there was a different file system on the disk at a previous time. It is then possible, using the partition manager to force the disk to act as a certain format, eg FAT32 or NTFS before recovering the files.

Often in instances where the file system has been changed, most of the critical file information will have been overwritten, but fortunately all file systems tend to use different areas of the disk so it possible that a complete MFT (NTFS directory sectors) may still be intact as may be many FAT32 directories. By analysing this remaining fragmenst, it is possible to determine the critical parameters before attempting a recovery.

Often a very complete recovery will be possible, as long as the disk has not been used too much after reformatting.