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To aid with recovery of a disk, it is often worth knowing what type of operating system has been used.  For a CD / DVD they are normally either ISO9660 or UDF.  Most memory chips are FAT (all variation, FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32).  While a hard drive is normally either FAT32 or NTFS or Linux

If an optical disk is being read, they can be NTFS, FAT, HPOFS or one of many proprietary formats which is beyond the scope of CnW Recovery Software, though a Raw recovery may assist.

Very often, CnW Software will automatically detect the relevant format, but there can be times when for instance a disk has been reformatted with a new operating system. In this case, it is often useful to scan through the disk to find sectors that indicate exactly what the format was.

With a good disk, the location to start is with the boot sector, and this is decoded by the Partition function.  However, this function cannot immediately display partitions that have been overwritten, or totally corrupted, a more manual process is required.