System - Disk Recovery (5)

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.

Disk2vhd is a utility that can create live "snapshots" of Windows volumes, allowing you to duplicate/backup systems while running. The program creates Virtual Hard Disk files (.VHD, Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) from physical disks and can be used in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs).

The program uses Windows' own Volume Snapshot capability added starting with WinXP to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is saved to a different disk than ones being converted).

PartitionRecovery is an application to recover the partitions which have been accidentally deleted. It works with FAT32 and NTFS partitions.

CD Recover is a copy program that will skip parts of a given file it cannot read without aborting. This is important for recovering corrupt video data from CDs. It can be configured to skip a certain number of kbytes on read error, or to keep on trying until the read succeeds.