Fix that Corrupted Hard Drive

We've all seen it at one point or another. Either a corrupted partition table or Master Boot Record (MBR) making a hard drive unreadable. Data recovery cost a fortune. I've opened more than one computer and found a hard drive thats not hooked up. Some one was playing with fdisk and killed the partition. Recovery cost to much but they had data or pictures they didn't want to loose.

The solution I've found is TestDisk. Version 6.11.3 was released today. Test disk is licensed under the GPL and is Open Source. Whether the corruption occurred because of faulty software, virus or good old human intervention. TestDisk is designed to repair a bad partition table or even make a non booting disk bootable again.

From the TestDisk site:
TestDisk can

• Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
• Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
• Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
• Fix FAT tables
• Rebuild NTFS boot sector
• Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
• Fix MFT using MFT mirror
• Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
• Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
• Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions.

TestDisk has features for both novices and experts. For those who know little or nothing about data recovery techniques, TestDisk 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.

The good folks at cgsecurity.org have put together a huge list of common problems and how to fix them with TestDisk. Everything from recovering a corrupted FAT32 partition to repairing the Dell Utility partition on Dell computers. Even recovering a reformated partition. This little Open Source tool is a dream.

Yeah but what does it run on?
Best of all TestDisk runs on just about everything under the sun. From Dos (including FreeDos and Win95 DosBox) Windows NT series (from NT4 all the way up to Vista) just about every Linux or Unix know to man and even MacOS. The list of file systems it can fix is longer than the list of systems it will run on. Everything from FAT12 to XFS. Yes, NTFS too.

Getting the software
Linux folks should check their distros repository first. But if it's not available there are more than enough live cds to go around. You can find the most up-to-date list here. For the Windows users out there, TestDisk can be downloaded for your version of Windows from here.