Hard Drive Data Recovery Page -3

Freeware Data Recovery Programs TestDisk

TestDisk is a tool to check and undelete partition
Works with the following partitions:

BeFS ( BeOS )

BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )

CramFS (Compressed File System)

DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32, NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP/2003 )

HFS, Hierarchical File System

JFS, IBM's Journaled File System

Linux Ext2 and Ext3, Linux Raid, Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)

LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager

Netware NSS

ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6

UFS (Sun/BSD/...)

XFS, SGI's Journaled File System

When you run Testdisk, you get a screen listing your available physical drives.

Highlight the drive you wish to recover and select the Analyze option. It will show the current partition structure and when you Press Enter, It will start searching the drive for partitions. If you have Deleted your partition table, nothing will be here.

Testdisk Recover Lost Data

Once this search is complete, Press Enter again. It's always good to run the Search Option to do a more comprehensive search of the drive. If you had no partitions shown, because of a wiped or damaged partition table, Testdisk will now hopefully have Original partitions. Verify the information and select Write Option to save the new Partition information onto the disk.

Your Partitions should now be up and running again. If you damaged the partition boot sector on your partition, you should select the Advanced Option, then Boot It will compare the boot sector to the backup boot sector. If they are different it will ask you if you wish to overwrite the boot sector. You can list files of Partition by pressing P.