save my FAT's plz

[hitogoroshi]

Anyone know of a good free way to recover deleted FAT files? It's possible, but most programs out there just show the files and demand ~30 bucks to get em back. Any way to do this for free?

[Red Dragon]

Re: save my FAT's plz

Ice cream... Lots and lots of ice cream.

[Alex]

Re: save my FAT's plz

Ho ho ho ho ho.

[The Ice Cream Man]

Re: save my FAT's plz

Ice cream... Lots and lots of ice cream.

Now you're in my territory.

[Ryner]

Re: save my FAT's plz

I think thetruecoolness linked me to a very effective, and free, file recovery progrom back when my hard drive crashed. I don't remember what it was called, but maybe he does?

Edit: Wait, here it is. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

[Seraph]

Re: save my FAT's plz

A little off topic, but whats the differance between FAT and NTFS? And which is a better format?

[Vonwert]

Re: save my FAT's plz

One takes longer to climb the stairs....?

[Seraph]

Re: save my FAT's plz

When I had to re-install XP a few months ago, it asked how I wanted to reformat my HD. FAT32 or NTFS. I choose NTFS because that's what it was to begin with. What's the difference between the two?

[Chad]

Re: save my FAT's plz

It's simply in how they store and access data. NTFS is usually a good choice.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...october01.mspx

[thetruecoolness]

Re: save my FAT's plz

Yeah NTFS is the way to go, since it is much more reliable than FAT (well more reliable anyway). Basically a file system is just a specific definition of how the bits and bytes of your files are stored, what metadata (file name, access date, title, etc) they have, how they are accessed and where they are stored on the disk (see fragmentation), and other things like that. So the main difference between file systems are typically, reliability, speed of access, speed of search, how fragmented they get, and what security they support. Essentially it's similar to a database management system (some more than others).

If you would like I can get into a discussion of fragmentation but that would be pretty long. Basically the best file systems are pretty much UNIX exclusive (ReiserFS, ext3), but NTFS isn't that bad. So since NTFS is more reliable (has two File Allocation Tables, and other things), and performs at par with everything FAT has, does not have a 2-4GB limit on file size (which becomes a big deal with DVD images), and supports file level security.

At some point MS might get off their ass and get WINFS out, which 'should' improve search pretty dramatically, because they will finally be where other file systems have been for years (journalizing and various other smarter file storage schemes).

[Seraph]

Re: save my FAT's plz

Ok, thank you. I understood most of what you said.

[Chad]

Re: save my FAT's plz

To sum it up. A file system is how your files and folders are ACTUALLY organized on your computer. You see C:/Program Files, the computer sees it differently. When you double click folders and files it pretty much goes, "Oh, I know where that is." The file system is what tells the computer where the file is, and all of it's information ( What it's name is, how big it is, etc; ).

Fragmentation is when files aren't stored in one chunk. Ever run the defragmenter tool? You see that lovely visual representation of where your files are. Those big white spaces are bad because it forces the computer to look around for your files. The closer your files are actually stored on the drive, the faster and easier the computer can peruse them.

UNIX has file storage systems that limit fragmentation of files. NTFS isn't too bad, but WINFS (The new system MS is doing) will be better.

Thank you.

[thetruecoolness]

Re: save my FAT's plz

Oh and Windows does have the most problems with fragmentation of most OSes because they take a 'lazy' apparoach to the problem (also though I'm not certain I think it will put files randomly on the disk sometimes, just to **** with you or something), and have you run the defragmentation program every so often as opposed to having something run constantly in the background to keep things from getting fragmented (and also have better algorithms for dealing with it, though solving fragmentation problems is pretty difficult, since files change size very often).

Also there are two types of fragmentation, external (which is displayed in the defragger), and internal, which isn't so bad for files and is displayed in properties (Size on Disk vs Size of File). External occurs when there isn't enough space in between to files to create the file you need so it must leave that gap and put your new file elsewhere, or your old file has grown up to the boundary of another file and so your file must now be two (or more) pieces spread out on the disk, internal occurs when you give more space to a file than it needs (because of physical disk boundaries), but since most files normally grow anyways this is less of an issue. This is also why unless you have about 15% disk space you cannot defragment very well, since you need some big open spaces to move files around to defragment them.

So like Postulate man said, the more your files are spread around your disk, the slower things go, also the further away from the center of the disk they are the slower things go. Reason being is on a disk moving from the center to the outside (Seek Time) is much more costly than just staying put and waiting for the disk to spin to what you want (Rotational Latency), so if things are close together, there is less movement in and out.

Also Windows defragmenter sucks most of the time, but unfortunately most other ones cost money. So I guess you can think of it like a library, where if you can put all the books on one set of shelves it's faster to get a book, but if you have the books spread out all over the library then it takes longer. So if one of your books magically grows and there isn't room for it on the shelf anymore (since the shelves can't grow, and it would take longer to move all the other books than just the growing one), you have to move it to another shelf. Enough books do that and you now have them all over the library. Not the best analogy, but it's close enough, and I think more people will get it than the other part of this post.