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There are cases of a FAT32 disk being reformatted as NTFS.  This means that much of the file structure is lost, and also the FAT can be overwritten or corrupted.  Fortunately, as long as too much data is not written with the NTFS structure, many files can be recovered.

There are several stages in this operation, as decribed below

Start the program, and skip the wizard.  It is now necessary to indicate that the disk is to be treated as a FAT32 disk, rather than an NTFS disk.  This is done using the Partition function, and selecting the operating system as FAT32, rather than NTFS.

Now select the Recover function, and the FAT options screen should be displayed.  There may be several error messages displayed as the FAT paramters will not be known.  Select the function Analyse disk parameters.  The analyse function may take some time as it is trying to find old FAT32 directory entries.  Once found, it will populate the FAT parameters as for the original FAT disk.

To recover the FAT files, the best option is probably  Recover from directory stubs, along with Ignore FAT.  The program is now set up to recover the original FAT32 files.

Because the FAT is almost certainly corrupted, it has to be ignored, and so files that were originally fragmented will be corrupted.  The success rate does depend on may variables, in particular how much data has been written with NTFS, which would overwrite old FAT32 files.  The directory structure may also be rather limited, and there will be Lost_dir directories as the parent node may have been overwritten.