Hard Drive is the most important storage device in your computer to store your precious data. You can store big amount of data on it and can manage the data and space very easily. To store data more effectively, hard disk is divided into several partitions (called logical partitions). These partitions maximize the storage space and help you to prevent data loss conditions in case of operating system crash. Some special methods are used to divide your hard drive into partitions. In windows operating system these methods are FAT and NTFS file systems.
Among FAT and NTFS files systems, FAT is the file system that is most commonly used in computers. It stands for File Allocation Table. It is a table that Operating System maintains on the hard drive that provides a map of clusters. Cluster is the primary unit of logical storage on the hard drive. When you create a new file on a hard drive, it is stored in one or more clusters depending on the file of size.
A partition is divided into the clusters of identical size. The size of the cluster is different depending upon the type of FAT being used and the total size of the partition. Generally its size lies from 2KB to 32 KB. The FAT is the list of entries that map to every cluster on the logical partition. Each entry contains one to these five things:
• The pointer of the next cluster.
• A special EOC (end of cluster chain) entry which indicate the end of chain
• A special entry to indicate the reserved cluster
• A special entry to indicate the bad cluster
• A 0 to show that the particular cluster is unused
There are many different versions of FAT that uses different size for their entries. Its size is indicated by its name, for instance FAT16 uses 16 bits of each cluster entry which FAT32 uses 32 bits. This is the most widely used and most reliable file system in windows operating systems.
Sometimes when you try to access any file from your computer hard drive, it displays an error message- “file *.* not found”. This situation occurs when your FAT table is corrupted or deleted. The corruption in FAT table may occur due to a number of reasons including Operating system corruption, virus attack, importer shut down and accidental deletion of cluster.
If any of these situations occur, it may make your entire logical partition inaccessible and may cause serious data loss. Because when your FAT gets corrupted or deleted, the operating system fails to find the particular file you want to access. This is a very critical and shocking data loss situation for you as you lost all the data stored on the partition. Don’t panic? These data in not irretrievable, it is possible to recover these lost data with the help of advanced technology of data recovery software. In this case you can recover data with the help of FAT data recovery software.
Windows Data recovery software are the logical solutions of recovering you’re lost due to deleted or corrupted File Allocation Table. These software use advanced searching techniques to search the deleted files and display all the recoverable files in a tree format. You can find the required file very easily from this tree and can save them to the specified location.
There are different FAT partition recovery software available in the market. Among all these software, Stellar Phoenix Windows Recovery is simple and easy to use FAT data recovery software. It is a read only and non destructive data recovery software that restore all lost data in their original format.
