FAT32 partitioned to NTFS - can data be retrieved from previous FAT32?

[Wedge1]

I have recovered an entire disc drive (USB external) with GetDataBack. All the data is now safely on a separate drive and things appear to be intact except for some missing MS Word documents. All pictures and music that I wanted to save are fine, but there is just no sign of the MS Word documents.

I have formatted the USB external drive to NTFS before discovering that the Word documents are missing. Is there any hope for recovering these?

The data saved using GetDataBack contains 8-9 folders, one of which appears to be nothing but restore point data. Is it possible to use this to recreate the partition in order to get the documents I need?

 

[Wedge1]

The external drive didn't "crash". It was oringally formatted as a FAT32 drive and simply wasn't visible to a Windows Vista-based system.

So I took the external drive and connected it to an XP Home Edition NTFS system that contains the software GetDataBack. Using this program, I was able to retrieve data from the external drive, copying it to the computer running XP Home.

But for some reason, there are no MS Word documents present from the recovery. Only jpegs and mp4s (ipod tunes) are visible.

Is there a way to use the data I recovered and effectively restore the partition to it's previous state so I might retrieve the MS Word documents with some other method.

 

[Freestone]

If you don't have the NTFS version of GetDataBack then possibly Quick-Formatting the USB drive to FAT32 and try GetDataBack against it again?

 

[Wedge1]

Hmm....that's an idea, and probably the cheapest solution.

Or, i could buy the NTFS version and try that.

I'm assuming the format was a high-level format? I simply used the disc management feature in XP to format the external drive. So this means it is still possible to recover files?

 

[Freestone]

I don't know if Disk Management's format is high-level or not so I'm not sure what chances you will have for success, but keep it in mind if no other option presents itself.

 

[darkquad]

There are plenty of other software available, not only GetDataBack. Maybe you could try something different?

For example, DiskInternals Partition Recovery (

http://recovery-review.com/unformat-tools/diskinternals-partition-recovery-1-9.html)

or any other unformat tool (see

http://recovery-review.com/unformat-tools/

section on that site, for example). Anyway, something will help, you just need to find the proper tool. So search, surf the web, read reviews...