[HOWTO] manual recovery of FAT

Using TestDisk to repair the filesystem
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gander
Posts: 1
Joined: 16 Jan 2014, 14:47

[HOWTO] manual recovery of FAT

#1 Post by gander »

testdisk didn't work for me. my usb stick has the habit of erasing first part of the disk, and I unfortunately placed my filesystem there (instead of partition-table). bad mistake.now testdisk tells me bad bootsector. so I switched to expert mode and tried repairing it and luckily I got:

Potential FAT location
FAT - sector - score
16 257 32

as I copied this position "257" and used the suggested default clustersize of 16, the files reappeared.

of course before doing all that onto my backed-up disc-image I first formatted the usb stick the same way as previously and started testdisk on it to figure out the geometry and filesystem-type. (running testdisk on a file will definitely not guess geometry correctly, you must run it on the actual device.) also it helped to build up my confidence when I searched for some known filenames or text-data in my image-file...

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