cgsecurity.org

Hi All,

I've got a USB drive that I unfortunately let WIndows10 run a repair on, it repaired and put 2 folders full of .chk files in. Testdisk only seems to see the repaired Fat32 and backup Fat32 info now. Is the previous Fat32 info available for recovery? In the RebuildBS section I see some files listed if I press (no) and move a few pages across but none seem to have the root dirs. Is this a dead end? A few extra details from the log are below.

Boot sector
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 64 (FAT) != 255 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 32 (FAT) != 63 (HD)
OK

Backup boot sector
Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 64 (FAT) != 255 (HD)
Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 32 (FAT) != 63 (HD)
OK

Sectors are identical.

A valid FAT Boot sector must be present in order to access
any data; even if the partition is not bootable.

Thanks very much for your help.

You did not explain what the "previous partition" should have been before.

As chkdsk only affects the content within a partition and does not change the partition type there is noting that can be considered as "previous partition".
As chkdsk writes on your partition it may have overwritten information you tried to recover.

You can try Photorec hoping to find lost information.

Ok, sorry for my ignorance. It was a FAT32 formatted usb stick and yes, looks like chkdsk has overwritten these .chk files. Photorec does recover files but it's a lot of work to sort through them as there are no file names or accurate dates to be able to find the most recent files that I don't have backups of (it's not my USB stick but someone I know who I'm helping out). I understand that is worth it if I get the data back with Photorec and I'm greatful of that but was just wondering if testdisk could repair it. Another data recovery software shows that it finds 4 FAT32 records, I was only expecting 2, so was wondering if the old FAT32 table was still there somewhere. I just guessed that chkdsk repaired the FAT32 table and the backup FAT32 table as they are the same.