Coming back from the dead. A FAT32’s story.

I’ve forgotten why but it appears that I still had an old FAT32 partition on my (windows) computer (primary is NTFS). Last week, it crashed taking down all my photos, DL, and so on at the same time :) (Since Murphy’s law is the great rule that unified them all, let’s say I’d never heard of such things as backup !) The only things left was this dull message : The disk in drive D is not formatted. Do you want to format it now ? - NO !

Sadly when it comes to windows, software often rimes with money (or with astalathings – you’re evil !). Fortunately, I found TestDisk(1) which, one more time, prove that there IS a true god out there on the internet. Bless the GNU God.

This nice tool try to reconstruct the boot sector (look in the advanced menu) and find the root directory. I suggest that you let it find the root directory by itself if the first candidate seems not valid (use Abort, it’ll look for the best match).

If it succeeded, you can check the validity of its solution with List and write a brand new boot sector. Life can be beautiful, isn’t it !

Tools:

(1) http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk