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Posted 2004-07-03, 10:31 PM
in reply to Sovereign's post "Formatting question."
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You can use Norton Utilities to retrieve data, depending on how the disk was formatted, but since the file system is overwritten during all formatting processes, you can only retrieve:
Files that were contiguous on the hard disk (unless you defragged before the last access to the file, not very likely), and not in the root directory--this is done by searching for the file name in the old subdirectory records then looking at the indicated starting cluster. Since the FAT is toast, if the file is not contingous, there's no telling where the other fragments are
Files that are mainly textual in nature (word processing documents)--you can search for text you know appears in various fragments and piece them together.
A quick format overwrites the FAT and root directory.
If you repartitioned, 1 sector in each track is toast as well.
A full format (takes hour+ for most drives these days) erases everything.
Also, in the case of NTFS, I know nothing.
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