Recovery from a dead FAT32 Windows drive
My landlord's old PC has suffered several failures over the years, including several fans and power supplies and at least one hard drive. When I moved in a year ago they called me over to replace yet another PSU for them, and a few months later to figure out why the machine would not even begin to boot.
The suspect was immediately either the IDE controller or both of its drive. After transplanting the drives to a seperate machine and failing to find their partitions, and after trying a new drive in the machine it was looking as though possibly all were fried.
A couple months have passed and my landlord has had me build him a new computer and the day has come to try to recover his data... Below is the process I've used to diagnose and recover his files.
Determining / Recovering a Partition’s UUID (Univeral Unique Identifier)
I made a boo-boo after reinstalling my base Ubuntu system, and accidently copied over the entirety of the fresh installation's /etc/fstab file with my old /etc/fstab.
The UUIDs of my new installation were lost, so after a little Googling I found that there's a helpful little utility called "vol_id" specifically for determining this type of info...
vol_id [partition]
and voila, I've got my fstab back in fine shape 