Home > Data Recovery on FAT Disks

The FAT disks store file name, size and attributes in the Directory Table, and the file content is stored in disk data area. The directory table record of the file stores the first cluster file content in Data Area, while the remaining numbers is stored in FAT Table. To reduce the operation time, the system only deletes the first character of the file name in Directory Table so other regular programs can no longer lasts. The Directory Table record can be used later for another file.

The following three things should be kept in mind before the data is recovered from the FAT disks, they are: Firstly, The time should be consumed less, until the disk has been defragmented, Secondly, the sooner you make a data recovery attempt the better is the result and Thirdly, the smaller the size of the file to recover the more chances for success we have. It is recommended that we can save recovered files on another disk because of the risk of overwriting other erased files with the new saved one. The FAT file system has the file allocation table located at the beginning of a logical volume.

FAT was designed for small disks and simple folder structures. Two copies of the file allocation table are stored on the volume. The system clears all the clusters marks, so they appear empty. During the course of further disk use, these clusters can be reused to store other files. The Damage rates displayed indicate that the ratio of reused clusters which had been earlier used by now-erased file. Because of the loss of cluster marks, we may only assume that file was not fragmented and all its clusters are sequential. Starting at the first file cluster, the program reads the file content from the corresponding number of sequential clusters. It is no wonder that this assumption is not always correct. That's why sometimes, even with a Damage ratio of zero percent, the file appears corrupted after recovery. Three conditions determine data recovery success on FAT disks: if file record in Directory Table hasn't been reused, if file cluster sequence is assumed correctly if file clusters were not reused after deletion.

FAT disks were not directly designed to support file undelete so the possibility to even try to restore at least something is the Grace by itself. The number 12, 16 or 32 determines amount of bits used to store one FAT disk. These entire file systems are supported by operating systems Microsoft Windows XP. The storing information on FAT disks is the cluster. The Cluster size depends on FAT version and disk configurations, and is usually equal to several kilobytes. If a file does not fit to a single cluster, system reserves several clusters to store it. When file clusters are not sequential but are separated in fragments at different locations, we call this a fragmented file.

FAT file systems store file name, size and attributes in the Directory Table, while file content is stored in disk Data Area. The Directory Table record of the file also stores the number of the first cluster file content in Data Area, while the remaining sequence of cluster numbers is stored in FAT. Thus, the data recovery from FAT disk is a tedious job and requires a lot more patience and advanced technology and the cost of recovery is quiet more compared to other types of disk recovery.

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