0

I accidentally deleted a .pyw file (plain UTF-8 text) from my FAT32, 16Go USB stick and tried to recover it using several softwares such as Recuva, Disk Drill, TestDisk etc...

But the ones that found the deleted file showed that the partition was overwritten by an older .ppsx file, that I didn't even open the folder it was in for months. This second file had also not been used by any software, at least recently. How is that possible? Do FAT32 systems randomly rearrange the partitions when you delete a file?

From this post:

Available space increases but the file data is not deleted until that space is needed by something else.

So this shouldn't happen, right?

D_00
  • 105
  • 5

1 Answers1

0

Do FAT32 systems randomly rearrange the partitions when you delete a file?

No. As you found, FAT32 will mark the space occupied by the file as "free to be over-written"

It is possible the drives firmware re-allocated or flagged sectors for wear-levelling purposes.

I'm not sure what you mean by a -partition- being overwritten by a -file-. And I don't speak french.

mitts
  • 43