TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It 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 deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.
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.
Operating systems
TestDisk can run under
- DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
- Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista),
- Linux,
- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
- SunOS and
- MacOS
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
- Windows exFAT
- HFS, HFS+ and HFSX, Hierarchical File System
- JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
- Linux ext2 and ext3
- Linux LUKS encrypted partition
- Linux RAID md 0.9/1.0/1.1/1.2
- 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/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 )
- 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
