Data Recovery Weekly

You can only align a partition (on a hardware block boundary) if a cluster size is an integral multiple of your hardware block size. This means you cannot align a HFS partition, because it would happily use 19 or 27 sectors per cluster. Most other filesystems would use a cluster size that is a power of two, matching the hardware block size. Another thing is that if the boot sector and the data area use different alignments, it is the data area that you align. On FAT, there may be 1025 or whatever odd number of sectors between the boot sector and the first cluster of actual data. If you align the FAT partition's boot sector, the data would then be offset by one sector.

Is it possible for a data recovery software to get a correct file and folder structure but bad file content or vice versa? Why does it happen? The answer depends on the filesystem type being recovered. On FAT, the location of the parent folder is determined depending on the same formulae which are used for finding data. If the parameters in these formulae are invalid, neither data nor a folder structure can be restored. Hence, typically if you have a folder tree recovered properly or close to that, the files should be good as well. On NTFS, there are two independent sets of parameters, one set controlling the data location and the other set covering the parent-child relationships in a folder tree. So on NTFS, it is theoretically possible (and sometimes happens) to have one good set of the parameters but the other one wrong. So, if you unformat an NTFS drive, a good folder tree full of damaged files is perfectly possible. On HFS and HFS+, the parent-child relationship is described by ...