Nik carver Posted January 13, 2009 Share Posted January 13, 2009 After running Recuva on a FAT32 hard drive I lost all the space (Properties reports I have 111GB free - yet I cannot move a 2 GB file on to the drive) Tells me I have no free space. What is wrong? How do I fix it? Desperate!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted January 13, 2009 Moderators Share Posted January 13, 2009 What do you mean, after running Recuva? Did you just scan the drive, or recover any files? How many, and where to? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik carver Posted January 13, 2009 Author Share Posted January 13, 2009 What do you mean, after running Recuva? Did you just scan the drive, or recover any files? How many, and where to? Umm OK, allow me to back it up a little for you, I used Recuva to scan and recover all previously deleted files on a FAT32 Drive! I then recovered 27 jpeg files. Those 27 jpeg files were saved to my main NTSF C: Drive, in the temp folder. Out of those 27 jpeg files I retained 3 jpeg and deleted the other files. I placed those 3 jpeg files back on to my FAT32 Drive. Each of the 3 jpeg files is between 130 - 160 kb in size. The result is as I have said above! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted January 13, 2009 Moderators Share Posted January 13, 2009 I used Recuva to scan and recover all previously deleted files on a FAT32 Drive! Did you recover those back to the FAT32 drive? If so this is bound to be unsuccessful. Either the deleted entries in the MFT will be overwritten by a new file name whilst Recuva is reading them, or the data that is being recovered will be overwritten by the recovered files. If you recovered elsewhere, fine. I then recovered 27 jpeg files. Those 27 jpeg files were saved to my main NTSF C: Drive, in the temp folder.... I placed those 3 jpeg files back on to my FAT32 Drive. OK. How much space did you have on the FAT32 before you started the recovery? How much after the recovery, if you recovered to the same drive? As you may imagine I don't know the answer to your problem, I'm just trying to establish the train of events. If your FAT32 drive properties is showing 111 gb free and you can't copy a 2 gb file to it I would perhaps run a chkdisk to validate the state of the disk, then run some software to give an analysis of the disk, such as Defragger analysis stage. What does Recuva say if you run the scan again? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik carver Posted January 14, 2009 Author Share Posted January 14, 2009 Did you recover those back to the FAT32 drive? If so this is bound to be unsuccessful. Either the deleted entries in the MFT will be overwritten by a new file name whilst Recuva is reading them, or the data that is being recovered will be overwritten by the recovered files. If you recovered elsewhere, fine. OK. How much space did you have on the FAT32 before you started the recovery? How much after the recovery, if you recovered to the same drive? As you may imagine I don't know the answer to your problem, I'm just trying to establish the train of events. If your FAT32 drive properties is showing 111 gb free and you can't copy a 2 gb file to it I would perhaps run a chkdisk to validate the state of the disk, then run some software to give an analysis of the disk, such as Defragger analysis stage. What does Recuva say if you run the scan again? As I noted in my first post, I had 111gb of free space on the FAT32 before I started recovery. I do not know the exact amount of space I have after the recovery because properties will only report 111gb of space. However, I do know I am unable to move 2gb of data onto the FAT32. Thus, I must have something less than 2gb of space currently available on the FAT32. I did not recover to the same drive! I recovered to my NTSF C: drive, in the temp folder! I understand you too are perplexed. Yet, I need to know how to fix it! I've tried to download Defraggler, but the download links on your website are dead. My "Executive Software Keeper" defragmenter reports that it is unable to defrag the disk. The analysis states "Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found 27 fragmented files and/or directories and 60 excess fragments. The average number of fragments per file is 1.00. On average, you have 0% excess fragments per file on this volume. This is a slightly fragmented volume." Then it also shows me that there could be a 58% improvement in read time. When I ran Recuva again all that happens is I retrieve 106,968 files which are unrecoverable. Which is to be expected because I overwrit them all Me thinks Recuva does not work so well with FAT drives Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted January 14, 2009 Moderators Share Posted January 14, 2009 'Which is to be expected because I overwrit them all.' So does this mean that after recovering the deleted files from the FAT32 to the C drive you ran Recuva to securely delete the files on the FAT32? That would put more fish in the kettle. (I feel like Hercule Poirot.) You might be moving towards backing up what is good on the FAT32 then reformatting and reloading. A backup never hurts, anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik carver Posted January 15, 2009 Author Share Posted January 15, 2009 'Which is to be expected because I overwrit them all.' So does this mean that after recovering the deleted files from the FAT32 to the C drive you ran Recuva to securely delete the files on the FAT32? That would put more fish in the kettle. (I feel like Hercule Poirot.) You might be moving towards backing up what is good on the FAT32 then reformatting and reloading. A backup never hurts, anyway. Absitivly posolutely, that is exactly what I mean when I say I over wrote the files (I securely deleted them with recuva). I will attempt backup & reformatting Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
regenold Posted January 19, 2009 Share Posted January 19, 2009 The 2 gig you are trying to copy isn't a single file is it? Fat 32 has a 2gig barrier.... just a thought, I have a 2gig iso that caused me problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik carver Posted January 20, 2009 Author Share Posted January 20, 2009 No it is a series of files!X Anyhow I fixed the prob. even simpler than a re-format. I scan disked and checked & fixed errors. Now all is good However, it is worth noting that Recuva caused these probs with a FAT 32 drive as a caution to others. (Probably not too many FAT32's left out there anyways Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Augeas Posted January 20, 2009 Moderators Share Posted January 20, 2009 Well, I think it would need exceptional circumstances for Recuva, or any application that uses Windows APIs, to cause disk errors that are fixed by chkdsk. FAT32 is still around for removable media of course, and possibly small devices with smallish drives or partitions. The max FAT32 filesize is I believe 4 gb - 1 byte. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now