NTFS to FAT32 issues

[PETEACHER]

Hi all,
This is my first post, and I found this forum because I’m having grief with a hard drive at the moment and I’m hoping to get some help.

Right here is the situation.

I have a Seagate free agent USB drive, 250gb. It work(ed) great until I changed the file system to FAT32 from NTFS.


I changed the file system from NTFS to FAT32 so that my PS3 can read it. I did this using a program called “swissknife v3”. The format went fine I think, I was able to load data onto the drive directly after the format and mucked around with it. However when I unplugged the drive and plugged it into another computer I was no longer able to see the data on the drive. When I checked the properties of the drive, it said the format is fine and tells me there is “X” amount of gig of data on it, but I can’t see it.

So now in windows I can see the drive as a FAT32 drive and when I hook the drive up to a Linux system it see’s it as a NTFS drive.

This is what I think has happened. The program (swissknife) changed the file system of the drive on the fly, but windows hasn’t kept up with the play and loaded the files onto the drive using the original file system (NTFS). I could be completely wrong as I don’t know enough about this.

Anyway, can I get my data back as its there taking up space but I can’t see it.


Cheers and thanks for any help
Ryan (PETEACHER)

 

[kestrel1]

Are you able to see the data on the computer that you changed the format of the drive on?

 

[wolluf]

Probably need a data recovery tool (eg, getdataback) to retrieve your data. Swissknife converted from ntfs to fat32 - rather than 'formatted'? If you do a filestore type conversion, always best to backup first as they can always go wrong (I've not used swissknife so no idea how good it is, but have used partition magic - and had some disasters). Would personally tend to copy, remove partition, create new & format, copy back - though I appreciate that can take a while if a lot of data. Depending how much data you need PS3 to access, might be worth creating 2 partitions, one (small) fat32 and large ntfs, once you are sorted. You can use XP to create fat32 partitions up to 32GB. Fat32 does tend to get very wasteful at these (250GB) sort of sizes (ie, minimum filesize gets large).

 

[PETEACHER]

Thanks for the replies kestrel1 & wolluf,

I managed to get most of the data back thankfully using the program “getdataback”. Wolluf I think I may follow your advice and have a small FAT partition and leave the rest of the drive in NTFS.

Once again thanks for the help.

Cheers
Ryan (PETEACHER)