Sorry, What forum should i be posting in?.... i want to write the program in C++ and therefore thought i should post it in the C++ forum... Please advise!!

Just to clarify, i don't want to download a file recovery program... i'm going to write a file recovery program.....and wondered if anybody here and also done this?

c++ or c programs (or programs written in any other language for that matter) are unreliable at best because the os may overwrite the sectors on the next write. Even Norton Utilities is not all that reliable. MS-Windows added the trash can for exactly that purpose, when a file is deleted the os moves it into the recycle bin directory and does not really delete it at all. It would be pretty easy to write a program to move files and directories back to their original location.

> and wondered if anybody here and also done this?
Assume the answer is "no", what is your next question going to be?
Then assume the answer is "yes", what is your next question going to be?

Or are you just conducting some kind of survey to see which boards have got the most experienced people?

Get to the real point and ask your real question instead of asking all these "meta" questions like "does anybody know....".
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#prune

For what it's worth, your question falls into my category of "if you need to ask, you're not ready to take on the task". There's a whole raft of complex issues which need to be addressed, and only really experienced programmers would have an appreciation of those issues, and would certainly know where to look to find the answers.

At the moment, you're just looking to get real friendly with the fdisk program because of all the times you will completely trash the file system to the point where windows refuses to reboot or repair the damage.

In answer to your meta question, I'll answer a qualified "maybe".
I've only tried this with FAT file systems, and only using spare disks in "read-only" mode, and only in real DOS where there is no concurrent disk accessing going on. It was also a long time ago.

But I'm not interested in nursing you through several months of development if that's what your next question is going to be.