I have a disk with 3 partitions. The first partition is FAT32.
A benchmark program overwrote the start of the disk:
MBR, FS info sector, FAT and the backup copies thereof.
Strangely, it stopped just before the root directory.
I made a clone of the corrupt disk before anything else. I do not install/output anything on the bad disk.
I can still search the raw sectors and find text files for example.
Now I had an identical system with same model disk and same partitions (same CHS values).
I used a sector editor to copy the first 72 sectors from a good to the bad disk (the clone actually).
This restored the second and third partitions; the problem is the first one. The file allocation tables
are garbage. If I put this disk as a slave into another PC, Windows attempts to do a scandisk, but
I decline this. With a sector editor, I see the dirty flag is not set, I presume that Windows must still look
at the FAT when booting, and decide this partition is invalid. It takes a long time to boot, and Windows
explorer shows the bad partition exists, that is all (with Win 2000 and XP). It is like when you have a linux
disk on a dual-boot PC, Windows just says Local Disk (F:), you can't get properties.
I have tried a variety of data recovery tools. Some see the sick partition, some don't. This is more than
a simple file undelete. Even recreating an MBR seems to be fairly routine task, but when FAT is gone,
that is quite a stumbing block.
I tried a scan for Excel files with one "inspector", and it ran 18 hours (the first partition is only 8 GB)! It gave me
about 30 files, all 1.4 MB. So it presumably just grabs so many clusters after the string of bytes that
signifies a Excel file. I could not load any of these "recovered" files into Excel or Openoffice. So after that
experience, I don't wish to pay at least $49 for each program I try and find it can't cope.
Now I am sure law-enforcement authorities must have better tools to recover files, for example if a paedophile
or terrorist formatted their hard drive.
Any suggestions what they would use?