FAT, the acronym stands for 'File Allocation Table'. FAT is the file system that is used in digital cameras, flash drives and many portable devices. For its simple and straight architecture, it is widely used in home computers. However, many tech geeks complain in terms of its performance, that is its poor memory management and time consuming file operation. Above all, due to the poor logical structure, the FAT file system gets corrupted during the usage and the data under these partitions become inaccessible or lost. Though it is advised to check for system errors regularly by CHKDSK utility, the data that has been lost or inaccessible can only be recovered through any partition recovery software.

Some of the prominent erroneous symptoms aftermath a FAT file system corruption:

Warning messages pop up showing one or more of the disk partitions are not formatted. Clusters of two different files point to a single cluster. Such files are referred as cross-linked files. Some clusters are marked as deleted or lost and the system fails to link to files using these clusters, where as they are seen as if being used by the FAT partition. Corruption of the internal structure leads to invalid files and/or directories. Invalid values in FAT entries.

Cause:

There can be a number of reasons for which the Fat file system gets corrupted. However, unexpected power outage leading to unexpected system shut down is one of the prominent reasons among them. Some more are as listed below:

Partition table corruption. The system drivers have gone bad. The crash of any application running or the operating system failure.

Resolution:

Try using CHKDSK, which can automatically check, disk errors and repair them as well. If the boot partition of the system is affected, the system gets restarted and you have to run CHKDSK manually.

If the above measures fail, you have to format the troubled drive and restore the data from the backup. However, if backup is not available or failed to restore the previously saved data, you need to run any partition recovery software to recover back all your formatted data.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is an utility that can retrieve your lost, deleted, formatted partitions from FAT, exFAT and NTFS based volumes. The software is powerful enough to dig out all your valuable data from the troubled hard disk drive under any data loss situation. This utility supports around 185 file types and is compatible with almost all currently used Microsoft Windows operating systems, such as Windows 7, XP, Vista, 2000 and 2003.