TestDisk

TestDisk is a tool to check and restore partitions TestDisk was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and / or make non-booting disks bootable when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or 'human error (such as accidentally erasing your Partition Table). TestDisk is a free and useful program which queries the BIOS (DOS/Win9x) or OS (Linux, FreeBSD) in order to find the disks and their characteristics (LBA size and CHS geometry). TestDisk does a quick check of the structure of your disk and compares it with your Partition Table for entry errors. If the partition table contains entry errors, TestDisk can repair them. If you have missing partitions or a partition table completely empty, TestDisk can search for partitions and create a new table or even a new MBR if necessary. However, it is the user to look over the list of possible partitions found by TestDisk and to select the one (s) that were used just before the drive does not boot or partition (s) been lost. In some cases, especially after having launched a thorough search of the lost partitions, TestDisk may show partition data which is simply the remains of a partition that had been deleted and replaced long ago. TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about the techniques of data recovery, settings command line / log and / debug can be used to collect detailed information on a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a technology for the 'further analysis. Those who are more familiar with these procedures should find TestDisk a handy tool in performing onsite recovery. TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems: BeFS (BeOS) BSD disklabel (FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD) CramFS, Compressed File System DOS / Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 HFS and HFS +, Hierarchical File System JFS, IBM's Journaled File System Linux Ext2 and Ext3 Linux Raid RAID 1: mirroring RAID 4: striped array with parity device RAID 5: striped array with information distributed parity RAID 6: striped array with information distributed dual redundant Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2) LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager Mac partition map Novell Storage Services NSS NTFS (Windows NT/2K/XP/2003) ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4 Sun Solaris i386 disklabel Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun / BSD /...) XFS, SGI's Journaled File System