Hi people, I have a system that has FAT16 file system on it. I have that file system on that for some reason so I don’t need to upgrade on that….but recently I had some files deleted and now I need to get them back. They are important for my official use and hold great importance. I know that there is software for recovery but since I have a FAT16 file system I guess that all won’t work on that. Please let me know the solution for this problem.

This is now a bit problem….since you are using an older file system I guess you are right…everything wont go on this one. But, I hope that you have tried some….before going on the hunt for a new one. In our office we Recover Lost Files by a software that supports FAT 12, FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS and NTFSS file systems. This one really works well and is simple to manage…..you don’t need to be an expert for that. This will be handy in solving your problem. Hope this will get the data back!!!!

I guess it comes down to how long ago the file was deleted, did you format or defragment the drive and whether you overwrote the file with other contents. There are two freeware tools that maybe of use to you at this stage, one is the freely available "Restoration" recovery tool. The authors (Brian Kato) site is no longer available so the only download link reliable is from SnapFiles.

The other - whilst not as intuitive as Restoration - is Convar's PC Inspector File Recovery. Try Restoration and see if it picks it up, you might want to also look at TestDisk which is a unix application that is probably the best when it comes to recovering lost volumes, files in lost volumes etc. Boot a distro of a live Linux and try it out. If you need more assistance with TestDisk please feel free to ask, I use it quite regularly and throughly recommend it if these simple tools fail.