Can anyone tell me from where I can find out if Windows stores more then one file allocation table ?

The reason that I am asking this question is because I accidentally deleted a couple of files off the local disk C: (IDE 40GB) running Vista 0x86. When I realized this I hooked up this same drive as a slave to another drive which was running XP and then ran GetBackData for NTFS.

When the scan was done one of the user directory which was found was not the same one which is actually created on the recovery drive. For example the Vista 0x86 drive has a user account and directory called AUSER which was the extra account I created when I first installed Vista. However in the list of recovered directories the user directory AUSER was not one them. Instead it had a very old user account directory which was for an old installation of Windows XP which was installed on that drive a long time ago. So it seems to me that the recovery data was for a really old installation of Windows XP. But I really needed was to recover a few files which I had accidentally deleted not the entire old OS.

Can anyone tell if it possible to recover any deleted file from a Vista 0x86 machine and if so why did I see the above discrepancy ?

FAT and NTFS are dissimilar concepts. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of file systems.

Have you tried undeleting your files?
http://apcmag.com/vista_to_have_inbuilt_undelete.htm

Have you looked in the Recycle Bin?

What file types were they, eg DOC, TXT, XLS?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you for the reply.

Sorry my bad I did not realize the title of my post does not match the description I am giving inside the post. The title should read NTFS and FAT. Yes I did check the Recycle Bin and they were not there. They were I think bmp or jpg can't be sure which one. Once GetDataBack was done I searched for part of the file name that I remembered giving the files. But this search came up empty too.

With respect to the article you have provided the link..thanks very much. It does say that you can recover previous files using Restore. I think this is the same as System Restore but I could be wrong. I will have to check this feature to see if the files can be recovered. If I do recover these files please accept my thanks for the help.

Victor

You could try PhotoRec:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

There are numerous tutorials on the subject of undeleting photo files using PhotoRec:
http://www.google.com/search?q=photorec+undelete

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks I've downloaded this program and will give it a try. Thank you again.