"Mayayana" wrote:
Interesting results here. EaseUS sess all the files,
takes a ridiculous amount of time, but will recover
up to 500 MB.

Con: $70 to do more. YThat seems absurd for a
FAT32 analyzer. There must be something else free
that can do the same thing.

If the files were deleted normally the chain of pointers to clusters
in the file allocation table will have been zeroed and all you will
have is the erased directory entry which contains the first cluster
number of the file. So, providing the drive has not been subsequently
written to, you can only be sure of recovering the contents of the
first cluster of each file. If file_size = cluster_size then you can
recover the whole file. Otherwise, if the file was fragmented (not
stored in contiguous clusters) you won't be able to recover the pieces
automatically.

Recuva, Minitool and Kickass all found olny corrupt
files. Minitool claimed to save out 1 GB worth but
they were all nonsense.

As you can see, there's no guarantee you will get them back.
I do know that Win 2000 corrupted one of the bits (or bytes) of the
first cluster number in the deleted directory entry so that made it
more tricky. I don't know if later OS's corrected this.

So I'm still looking for a highly competent, free
undelete. I don't mind paying for important software,
but recovering deleted files shouldn't be so expensive
and I can't believe that someone hasn't created a
free version. On the bright side, I have an SD card to
experiment with. Anything that can find all those
photos for free wins the contest.

In the old days I used Norton Utilities 4.5 to recover a
whole FAT 16 hard disk (probably about 20 MB) manually.
It had recently been defragmented so I succeeded but it took
ages because I checked that every recovered file was valid.