USB flash drives, better known as pen drive are very handy storage devices. When you plug the flash drive in the USB port, it detects it as a removable drive and assigns a drive letter to it. Although these low power consuming drives are quite popular as these are cheap and small but corruption leaves nothing in the world of computers. Corruption of USBs might occur due to virus infections, human errors, power outages, damaged operating system etc. During such conditions, you should consider using a third party data recovery software.

Consider a situation when you have a flash drive comprising of important documents, photos etc. When you insert it after using it on another system, you come across the following error message:

“Disk/drive is not formatted. Do you want to format it?”

Now you decide to format the flash drive so that you can get access to your flash drive again. Since you have important data in your pen drive, you don’t want to format your USB drive. If it had been a hard disk, then this condition could have led you towards an accidental deletion of partition. It is quite possible that the issue is with USB port and not the drive itself.

In order to resolve this issue of USB port, try to connect the flash drive to the motherboard. You see it might just work that ways as at times, wiring between the motherboard USB header and ports does not works properly with the USB drives. But if this doesn’t works too, then use Kernel for Windows partition recovery software to recover your important data. This tool is powerful and reliable and is integrated with algorithms especially to recover data that becomes inaccessible due to various corruption issues.

There are some limitations of FAT32 file system with Windows Operating Systems. So whenever these limitations are crossed your system gets corrupt and you need recovery software to get it recovered. Following are some of the limitations existing in FAT32 file system.

• Clusters cannot be 64 KB or larger. If clusters were 64 KB or larger, some programs (such as Setup programs) might calculate disk space incorrectly.

• A volume must contain at least 65,527 clusters to use the FAT32 file system. You cannot increase the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that it ends up with less than 65,527 clusters.

• The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB).

• The Scandisk tool included with Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 98 is a 16-bit program. Such programs have a single memory block maximum allocation size of 16 MB less 64 KB. Therefore, The Windows 95 or Windows 98 ScanDisk tool cannot process volumes using the FAT32 file system that have a FAT larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size. A FAT entry on a volume using the FAT32 file system uses 4 bytes, so ScanDisk cannot process the FAT on a volume using the FAT32 file system that defines more than 4,177,920 clusters (including the two reserved clusters).

• You cannot decrease the cluster size on a volume using the FAT32 file system so that the FAT ends up larger than 16 MB less 64 KB in size.

• You cannot format a volume larger than 32 GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Windows 2000.

In case your system gets corrupt and FAT32 file system gets damaged Kernel for Windows recovery software helps in recovering the lost, inaccessible, deleted data.

I have seen many people asking the question on various forums that “my hard disk has been accidently formatted. What can do to recover my data now?”. Accidental formatting of hard disk can leave every user in trouble, as this issue is concerned with major data loss. The user can lose all files, folders and program stored on the accidently formatted hard disk.

Well this blog is not just to discuss the issue but is more concerned about providing such people with a sustainable solution. So here is the solution and i.e. use data recovery software to get back all your data. Even files and folders that have been permanently deleted can also be recovered using such software. However, making the right selection is essential, as choosing any software without having the proper knowledge can disappoint you.

Kernel for Fat and NTFS is one such recovery software that can fulfill all your data recovery requirements. This recovery software recovers all available files and folders from the selected partition and enables you to save them at the desired location. You will be surprised to know that files and folders that have been permanently deleted can also be recovered. So isn’t it wonderful to get back deleted files and folders when you are striving hard to recover data lost due to accidental formatting of hard disk.

At times when you start your computer, it may not start successfully due to particular boot up process related issues. When you use fixboot command to solve the boot issues, it might change your file system from NTFS to FAT and might make your entire hard drive partitions and data inaccessible. Such behavior causes partition loss and you need to opt for partition recovery solutions to recover the inaccessible or lost data. In a practical scenario, when you try booting your Windows XP Professional computer, the process might halt with the following error message:

“We apologize for the inconvenience, but windows did not start successfully.”

With this error message, Windows prompts you to boot the system in Normal mode, Safe Mode with Command Prompt and Safe Mode with Networking. When you attach the affected hard drive to another system as a slave, which had Windows installed, the system will assign drive letter to the hard drive. But when you try to access the drive, Windows gives you an error message:

“The disk is not formatted; do you wish to format it now?”

After this error message, when you attach the hard drive with other PC and try to install new operating system using “Leave the current file system intact (No Changes)” option, the process fails because the partition is listed as:

“Partition 1 (Unknown)”

After this behavior, when you use Recovery Console and use CHKDSK command to detect and fix file system problems, you might encounter the following error message:

“The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.”

When you try fixboot command to resolve the boot issue, it comes up with the following message:

• “FixBoot is attempting to detect the file system type.
• The boot sector is corrupt
• FixBoot is checking the file system type
• The partition is using the FAT file system
• FixBoot is writing a new boot sector
• The new boot sector was successfully written”

After this process, the system boots properly but your NTFS partitions become FAT 32 and data stored on them becomes inaccessible. All you can do to recover data is use partition recovery software and scan the physical drive to recover all NTFS partition. These recovery software are specifically designed to scan the entire hard drive thoroughly and achieve quick and proficient data recovery.

Restore points are generated by system protection features for restoring system files at the time of unmanageable system crash. However, restore points are essential to restore data in any disastrous situations but you can remove those restore points that does not contain recent updates. In fact, you can remove all restore points except the recent one to make restoration easy.

Removing restore points except the recent one

To remove all system restore points except the recent one, follow these steps:

• Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Click Disc Cleanup

• Now launch this utility and click More Options tab. Under which click System Restore and followed by that click Clean Up tab a message will popup –

Are you sure you want to delete all but the most recent restore point?

• Click Yes then OK. Finally another message will popup-

Are you sure you want to perform these actions?

• Click Yes.

• Now, all the System Restore points except the most recent one are cleaned. As a result there will be more free space in hard disk.

If in any case, you fail to restore system files using system protection, consider recovery software to recover data. Recovery software helps you to effortlessly recover data after fatal system crash.