TestDisk & PhotoRec 6.11.1

TestDisk & and  PhotoRec 6.11.1 are two useful products which can help recover data.

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, FreeBSD) in order to find the Hard Disks and their characteristics ( LBA size and CHS geometry). TestDisk does a quick check of your disks 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.

However, it's up to the user to look over the list of possible partitions found by TestDisk and to select the one(s) which were being used just before the drive failed to boot or the partition(s) were lost. In some cases, especially after initiating a detailed search for lost partitions, TestDisk may show partition data which is simply from the remnants of a partition that had been deleted and overwritten long ago.

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, IBMs 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, SGIs Journaled File System

Photorec 6.11.1, as its name says it all, is capable of recovering lost pictures from digital camera memory and some other kinds of data. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

Photorec ignores the filesystem, this way it works even if the filesystem is severely damaged. It can recover lost files at least from:

• FAT
• NTFS
• EXT2/EXT3 filesystem
• HFS+

Major Features:

1. TestDisk:
   
   • 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.
2. PhotoRec:
   • Recover video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures from digital camera memory.
   • Is distributed under GNU Public License.
   • Is a companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again

 Requirements:

• DOS/Win9x
• Windows NT 4/2000/XP/2003/Vista
• Linux
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• Sun Solaris
• Mac OS X