If files have been deleted (including being deleted from
the recycle bin) on Windows 2000 with a fat32 file
system,is it possible to restore those files? . . . such
as using Norton Utilities? or are those files permanently
gone? (I assumed that with ntfs it is a permanent
deletion, but with fat32 the files could be recovered.)
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Josh

Hi, Josh.

The answers boil down to Yes, No and Maybe. :>(

Simply deleting the files, even "permanently", doesn't do anything but erase
the pointers to them and mark the disk space they occupy as "available" for
other files to be written into. Immediately after their deletion, the files
are pretty easily recovered by either (a) unerase utilities or (b) disk
editors. Norton Utilities include both (a) and (b) in the bundle.

Norton Unerase should work easily and well immediately after the deletion,
in either FAT or NTFS. For it to work properly, the directory (folder) that
held the pointers to the file must still be readable; the longer you've
continued to use the drive after the deletion, the greater the chance that
the pointers will have been wiped out completely. Also, the longer you
wait, the more chance that the actual file data will have been overwritten.

Norton DiskEdit can bypass the directories and look directly at each sector
of the hard drive. Even if pointers to the file no longer exist, the data
may still be intact. If you can find the data, you can use DE to round up
all the sectors that belong to the file and save them, either by copying
them into a new file, or by restoring pointers to the original sectors.
This was tedious work back when 20 MEGAbytes was a big HD; today's 20
GIGAbyte drives might take 1,000 times as long. :>(

All this is true with either FAT32 or with NTFS. The big difference is that
NTFS is so much more reliable that there is much less market today for Disk
Editor utilities. Symantec has not even bothered to upgrade their Norton
DiskEdit to work with NTFS; you still need to boot into MS-DOS to get full
use from it. There are a few editors available (Microsoft's DiskProbe is on
the Win2K Pro Resource Kit CD), but they are not as easy to work with as DE.

I had a catastrophic failure on a 25 GB NTFS volume a couple of months ago.
Even Chkdsk wouldn't run and the Dir command said I had the wrong diskette
in the drive. Luckily, I had some unpartitioned space on another large HD,
so I reassigned the drive letter (from E: to Z and created a new drive
(E to use temporarily so that there was no danger of overwriting my "lost"
data. After prowling through all our local computer stores and trying a few
"power user" level utilities (Fix-It for V-Com; Acronis DiskEditor, etc.), I
bought and downloaded R-Studio ($80 from www.r-tt.com). It recovered most
of my missing files - all the ones that I really wanted. My problem was not
just a regretted use of Delete, but a completely unusable MFT, so an Unerase
utility was out of the question. A cheaper solution should work for your
problem.

Good luck. Just remember, DON'T LET ANYTHING WRITE TO THAT VOLUME until
you've recovered your data or given up. Even defragging that volume is very
likely to move another file to overwrite the "unused" space on your HD.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(E-Mail Removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP

"Josh" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:010801c35478$2dfeae20$(E-Mail Removed)...
> If files have been deleted (including being deleted from
> the recycle bin) on Windows 2000 with a fat32 file
> system,is it possible to restore those files? . . . such
> as using Norton Utilities? or are those files permanently
> gone? (I assumed that with ntfs it is a permanent
> deletion, but with fat32 the files could be recovered.)
> Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
>
> Josh