my laptop is hp pavilion dv6599ee notebook......

operating system - windows vista premium home edition 32 bit

system failed to start and so used recovery manager and created backup on an external harddrive FAT

2 files were made backup.1.exe( general description restorewiz application,compatibility windows 95,98,me,2000,nt 4.0 service pack 5,xp service pack 2,server 2003 service pack 1)and backup.2.fbw

and inadvertantly before checking if my backup worked my friend restored my system to factory settings

now i was told by hp support that it is not possible to recover files from backup created by vista on a FAT external drive,is it true?

how could i recover my precious photographs and home videos?

i tried some disk recovery softwares which were freewares but doesnt seem to work.

if it is impossible for me to do this on my own ,do let me know which is a good data recovery software i could purchase.

is it possible to restore on a desktop using xp?

please please help.....

Hi femi, welcome to BC.
Fat32 has a 4gb file limitation. If your backup was larger then that and ended up as a single file, then it's probably incomplete and useless. This thread offers some things that may help. Read the whole thread. You may just get lucky.

well i had already found that link and i did try everything told on that forum except trying it on an xp system.after posting here i tried paretologic recovery and found so many of my photos on the scan but to recover them u need to register and since i have no idea whether the site is authentic decided i would buy a cd from a shop instead.thats when a friend told me he got another good recovery program and so today am gonna try it.i will never again put my photos in a computer again.

by the way the back up files exe is 2.38gb and fbw file is 3.09gb.