[HOWTO] manual recovery of FAT
Posted: 16 Jan 2014, 15:29
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...
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...