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Best tools for recovering lost FAT32 partitions on an HDD?

Candlelight

Candlelight

Admiral
Admiral
I had a file open on a mac running from a hard drive, and it got bumped and fell out (not sure if indicative of the drive or just FAT32 on a Mac but this is the third time this has happened to me, using two different - but identical in design - drives). Now the drive is corrupt and won't recognise on either Mac or Windows (on the Mac I can see it in Disc Utility but it won't mount. On Windows it shows up as a healthy (yet RAW) file system under Disk Management and assigns a drive letter, but the drive itself can't be read.

I tried TestDisk and it says it's goneburger.

The stuff on the drive is cloned so losing it isn't a problem, but I was wondering if anyone could suggest recovery software that might help in future. Thanks in advance.
 
If you physically dropped the drive and its unreadable after then there is very big chance that you can forget it, the fall will have misaligned the head assembly so it will simply never read anything again, recovery software will not work in this case.
 
Candlelight said:
I had a file open on a mac running from a hard drive, and it got bumped and fell out (not sure if indicative of the drive or just FAT32 on a Mac but this is the third time this has happened to me, using two different - but identical in design - drives). Now the drive is corrupt and won't recognise on either Mac or Windows (on the Mac I can see it in Disc Utility but it won't mount. On Windows it shows up as a healthy (yet RAW) file system under Disk Management and assigns a drive letter, but the drive itself can't be read.

I tried TestDisk and it says it's goneburger.

The stuff on the drive is cloned so losing it isn't a problem, but I was wondering if anyone could suggest recovery software that might help in future. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...


have you tried googling for other instances of the the problem. If you've had the two of the same model drive fail it's probably not an uncommon issue and some people may have found ways to recover (just as anyone who had a seagate 7200.11 (if I have the model right - think I still have a dead one around here) drive fail.
 
They were Adata SH93's with 640GB storage.

Can't spot anyone complaining about anything similar during an initial search.
 
Candlelight said:
They were Adata SH93's with 640GB storage.

Can't spot anyone complaining about anything similar during an initial search.
Click to expand...

and just looking their could be using a variety of drives - a review of the 320GB model listed a Fujitsu while a review on the 640GB had a Samsung Spinpoint HM641JI so maybe search and that drive model fo any problems.
 
Found mention of a program called UFS on hardware review (the reviewer who writes for Anandtech.com had used it previously in a test to recover data from disk that had been in raid config where things got "fried" as a test).

http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download.php

It's also cross platfrom.
 
Did you try with TestDisk or PhotoRec? I have only ran the latter, cause as far as I understand the former is for partition recovery, not file recovery, and PhotoRec does a pretty good job for locating things that look like files (for me at least), especially for known file types. It should find something even when the disk is totally gone, as long as parts of it are readable. Can't tell you how well it recovers them (worked well for me), but I'd say that if you ran TestDisk, you should give PhotoRec a try as well to see what it recovers.
 
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