Recently I was adding a second drive to my laptop and I was extending the partition on the old drive to use all the space. During the extending it error ed and I lost the partition. So I found some tools and tried to recover some of the files. Well after running the supposedly free tool for about 8 hours it found all the files I wanted to save. The popped up the warning saying it would only recover a Gigs worth of files. That was no where what I needed. So I looked into buying a tool. After an hour of looking most tool were anywhere from $100 to $500. Well I didn’t want to spend that much on a tool I would use one time. I did some more searching and found this tool called TestDisk. This tool recovered the partition and best of all was free. So I gave it a shot. In about 5 minutes I had my files back and the drive was up and running.
The tool it a portable app and it is a command line tool but it works great. Here are some pic of the interface and a brief from the Pendriveapp.com website it is hosted on.
TestDisk is a Free Portable Data Recovery Software tool. The tool was designed to help recover lost partitions and or make non bootable disks bootable again. TeskDisk is particularly useful when a system is not bootable because of a virus, software, or human error (accidentally deleting a Partition Table). This tool can fix a partition table, recover a deleted partition, rebuild or recover NTFS, FAT boot sectors, fix MFT, undelete and or copy files from NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3 partitions. Backup recovery is also supported.
You must remember I used this on a drive that I killed the partition on. I didn’t format it or re partition it. So I can’t say it will work in thoughs situations. But it worked quickly and recovered the disks partition with out any problems. So if you find your self needing to recover a partiotion give this app a try. You can download it at:
http://www.pendriveapps.com/testdisk-free-portable-data-recovery/
If you need to recover deleted files you may want to try Portable Data Recovery also. This is also a free portable app that recovers deleted files. You can find this at Pendriveapps.com as well.