Cool Data Recovery Tool

TestDisk description

TestDisk is a tool to check and undelete partitions

TestDisk was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again 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 the OS ( Linux, free bsd) in order to find the Hard Disks and their characteristics ( LBA size and CHS geometry). TestDisk does a quick check of your disk's structure and compares it with your Partition Table for entry errors. If the Partition Table has entry errors, TestDisk can repair them. If you have missing partitions or a completely empty Partition Table, TestDisk can search for partitions and create a new Table or even a new MBR if necessary.

TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, the command line parameters /log and /debug can be used to collect detailed information about a non-booting drive which can then be sent to a tech for further analysis. Those more familiar with such 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 distributed parity information
· RAID 6: striped array with distributed dual redundancy information
· 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

Learn More About Hard Drive Recovery Here

Hard Drive Recovery Part 1

Hard Drive Recovery presented at Toorcon by Scott Moulton of Forensic Strategy Services, LLC. Very detailed info on rebuilding hard drives and recovery of your own data

Hard Drive Recovery Part 2