TestDisk is a powerful drive and data recovery software that is designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again. This can be caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses, or of course human error (such as accidentally deleting your partition table).
The program is cross-platform with recovery tools for a long list file systems and includes the also-portable recovery software PhotoRec.
Note: Use with caution; it's recommended that you read the documentation and take your time. The software can easily made dramatic and difficult-to-reverse system modifications.
Category: | |
Runs on: | Win95 / Win98 / WinME / WinNT / Win2K / WinXP / Vista / Win7 / Win8 / Win10 |
Writes settings to: | None |
Stealth: ? | No |
License: | GNU GPLv2 |
How to extract: | Download the ZIP package and extract to a folder of your choice. Launch testdisk_win.exe. |
What's new? |
See: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_7.1_Release |
Now at v.7.2
v7.1
@juverax: given the nature of the program, I think I'd prefer to list non-beta tools in the entry, as they are presumably the most reliable. Still, good to see they're still making progress. I love this program.
v7.0
7.1 released: https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
v7.0
shnbwmn: The documentation on the website gives an effective breakdown: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
v7.0
I'm sure this program is fantastic, if I can only figure out how to use it.
v6.14
@bzl333: TestDisk is a multi-platform tool, so it has to speak some kind of computing Esperanto -- Linux users would be as puzzled as you are if it was the other way around... so you're right, it's an expert tool, as noted above.
v6.14
must be for experts because i had difficult time trying to locate missing/corrupted partition. Problem is it shows partition sector size + start/end sectors and not size in GB so i'm looking at a bunch of numbers that don't mean anything to me compared to usual view of a file explorer or typical partition manager program. Also didn't show partition names for me (like WinXP C:, Media Files D:, etc) except for the linux ones for some reason.
v6.14
Seriously great utilities. Helped recover several GBs of files from an external drive that became unrecognized in Windows.
Used the image creation tool to first create an image, then used PhotoRec to recover the contents (probably could have skipped the image creation part in hindsight). The only downside to the process is PhotoRec takes forever to complete, and was the filenames were lost.
v6.14
Partition table got corrupted and this program was able to get my files off the drive. Whew.
@juverax: Isn't 7.2 a beta/WIP version?
v7.1