cloud 9 blog

this has to be one the most awesome piece of software i have come across and it just saved me

from TestDisk’s site:

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.

i decided 2 days ago to trash my windows7 installation and try linux again. i chose Linux Mint 7 as it offers a little bit more than Ubuntu Linux regarding codex’s out the box and also the art and all that is much more prettier. anyways, this post is not about that but about testdisk and how it saved me.

i install linux mint and when i rebooted i got the dreaded grub22 error. i then decided to remove all MBRs on the disk as windows MBR was still lurking there. i used the awesome CD known as Hiren’s BootCD which has some awesome tools on it. i managed to remove all MBRs and rebooted and reinstalled Linux Mint. when i rebooted i got stuck on the grub screen. i said screw it and decided to unplug all my other drives and install Linux Mint again. this time it worked wonderfully. i plugged all my drives back in, booted up and linux booted up fine. once it, i saw to my horror that 2 of my harddrives lost it’s partition tables. i panic as i thought i might have by accident formated the wrong drives previously and all my data was on there. i then booted up with the hiren’s bootcd and used an application called Partition Table Editor, this managed to rescue one drive’s partition table but not my 1TB drive. i started to panic more.

then i decided to try gpart (unsuccessful), and some other stupid application that didn’t work. then i came across testdisk which sorted it out within 20 seconds. i kid you not. so yeah, i am stoked and i have my data back!