"Mayayana" wrote:
"Apd" wrote
| 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?

The FAT isn't intact when the file is deleted - the cluster chain for
that file is zeroed. All you have is the first cluster number in the
old directory entry. Unless it offers you a manual method, all an
undelete utility can do is assume the file was not fragmented and keep
adding next available clusters (from its starting cluster) until the
size (also in the old dir entry) plus slack space is reached.

If you made a backup of the FAT before deleting and the utility is
able to make use of it then you have no problem. FAT 32 does keep a
second copy of the FAT but normal deletion will zero that also.

The Norton advanced recovery would step through each erased directory
entry allowing you to add clusters automatically or select them
yourself. In either case, before saving, you could inspect the
contents of each one and try alternatives if the file didn't look
right.