"Apd" wrote

| 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.

Makes sense. Yet the files are mostly 5-6 MB, much
bigger than clusters. And EaseUS successfully recovered
all of the most recently saved files -- about 1 GB worth.
Yet none of the other programs did.

| 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.
|
That usually seems to work well. But isn't that
just a matter of finding the partition boundaries,
while the file allocation table is still intact?