Easy HD data recovery with TestDisk

Some days ago my notebook partition table was corrupted, something strange happened.
Nothing seemed to be possible: GParted couldn’t see any partition, Linux recovery couldn’t access to disk and also ultimate boot CD tools couldn’t see nothing… Only a blank disk!

Due job urgency, I was obliged to reinstall rapidly Debian squeeze. I was sure that everything would be unrecoverable.

Today I tried to do the impossible: recover my old data after repartitioning and formatting.

After some analysis I choose TestDisk.

You can install it without any problem using aptitude:

#aptitude install testdisk

after that execute:

#testdisk

Select the device that you want to examine and press Deeper search:

After some minutes you will see all the partitions that could be recovered (it found also very old partitions of mine); select the one you want and press <p> list files:

Here you have the partition as it was, select the directory that you want to recover and press <c> copy (this operation could take long time, it depends on data size):

Select the destination folder and let’s see how TestDisk does the dirty work.

When it finished your files are recovered! Now a simple chown -r and that’s it.

And now let’s do a backup!

Hope this could help someone…

Why have you to buy expensive Windows data recovery tools or download and crack it? Open source is what you need!!!

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