It is common for a disk to be formatted, but as long as it is not a full format (erasing all sectors), most data can still be recovered.  This wizard function works through the stages required for recovery.

The stages of anaysis and recovery are as follows

• Determine if current file system is as expected, if if the drive is currently FAT, was the original disk FAT
• If it is unknown, or a different file system is expected an analysis of the drive is carried out
• The analysis will scan the drive for old partitions, but in particulare will look for MFTs, old FAT directories and old MAC catalog entries
• The end result will be the partition screen shown below and it is clear that a current FAT has in the past been a NTFS drive

• The next stage is to recover data in the format determined from the above.
• As the disk is no longer the selected logical format, it will be necessary to do more analysis on the drive to determine the correct parameters.