Need to recover files on FAT16!!

[corbi8]

Hi people, I have a system that has FAT16 file system on it. I have that file system on that for some reason so I don’t need to upgrade on that….but recently I had some files deleted and now I need to get them back. They are important for my official use and hold great importance. I know that there is software for recovery but since I have a FAT16 file system I guess that all won’t work on that.

Please let me know the solution for this problem.

[NeilZ]

Hi people, I have a system that has FAT16 file system on it. I have that file system on that for some reason so I don’t need to upgrade on that….but recently I had some files deleted and now I need to get them back. They are important for my official use and hold great importance. I know that there is software for recovery but since I have a FAT16 file system I guess that all won’t work on that.

Please let me know the solution for this problem.

As long as you have not written or deleted anything new on that drive, there are plenty of free software utilities that can 'undelete' files, as well as a few commercial packages.

If you can find a copy of Norton Utilities, it has an undelete program that will fix this problem.

FWIW ... FAT16 is still used on floppy disks, and USB 'thumb' or 'zip' drives can also be formatted in FAT16. It is still a valid filesystem and recovery software can work on this.

HOWEVER ... and its a big however, if you wrote data to that drive after these files were deleted, it is VERY possible that the system OVERWROTE the clusters where that original data was stored.

To understand what I'm talking about you have to realize that when something is deleted on a hard drive, the only thing that happens to the file is that a flag in the file header is changed to reflect that the file was deleted. None of the data is changed. This is how many undelete programs work. They find these headers, and then change the flag to show that the file is present. However, if the system has data to store, it will look for clusters to use, it will then use the clusters that contain data if that file header shows that the data file was deleted.

Hope this helps