Formated USB Buffalo Drive

[pdurham]

I have a quick formated USB Buffalo drive that I am trying to recover data from. My registered copy of Zar 8.5 finds all my important files and I have saved them to my computer. However I am unable to open them. One of them is a windows backup of my system and the windows backup program complains that it is not a recognized windows backup when I try to use it.

When I did the recovery I just went with the default settings of Zar (there a lot of things to choose from). I am wondering if there are specific settings that I should have selected given that I am try to recover from a drive that was simply reformated and not corrupted.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

What is the filesystem type on the drive? If it is FAT, the reformat itself is a significant damage, because fragmented files cannot be recovered from a formatted FAT volume.

[pdurham]

Ahh, probably FAT, whatever the default Buffalo drives come as. Thanks for the quick reply.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

With FAT, we're not going to get any good result. See,

1. The files can be fragmented on the filesystem. If there is not enough contiguous free space to store the file, the file will be stored in several nonadjacent chunks. Also, if you store a file X, then the file Y, and after that you need to append something to the file X, the file X gets fragmented. There is no place to extend the file contiguously because it is occupied by Y. This applies to any filesystem you can practically encounter.

2. On FAT, the location of the first fragment is stored in the directory, and the locations for the subsequent fragments are stored in FAT table.

3. During format, the FAT table gets cleared. Only the location of the first fragment for each file remains known once the FAT is cleared. For the files which are not fragmented, that would be enough, but all the files which had two or more fragments are lost. (Note that on NTFS, the fragment location data survives the format).

4. Now, larger files have a tendency to fragment. Also, if you append the file often, it also tends to fragment. Your backup file matches both of these criteria, hence it is most likely damaged beyond any reasonable recovery.

Now the above only applies if you have a FAT volume. For further verification, you can get the log file (C:\Program Files\ZAR\logfile.txt), zip it and emal to development@z-a-recovery.com and I'll take a look to double check that we do not have some recovery fault.