TestDisk Tutorial to recover damaged partitions

TestDisk is a cross-platform utility for data recovery developed primarily to help recover lost data in partitions and to repair boot disks (bootable disks), problems caused by faulty software or hardware, or human error, such as accidentally deleting partition table .

TestDisk is a tool that can restore tables damaged or overwritten partition. The
important ability to recover damaged files. Testdisk allows working with images from hard drive, USB flash drives and memory cards, so the first thing you should do is clone and work with the copy.



Can TestDisk

•     Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
•     Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
•     Rebuild boot sectors FAT12 / FAT16 / FAT32
•     Arrange tables FAT boot
•     Rebuild NTFS boot sectors
•     Recover NTFS boot sectors of your backup
•     Fix MFT using MFT image
•     Locate the backup Superblock ext2 / ext3 / ext4
•     Recover files from the file system FAT, NTFS and ext2
•     Copy files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 / ext3 / ext4 eliminated

TestDisk can operate under

•     DOS or MS-DOS
•     Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, Windows 7 (x86 & x64)
•     Linux,
•     FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
•     SunOS and
•     Mac OS X

 

Advice

     TestDisk must be executed with Administrator privileges.

Important points for using TestDisk:

•      To navigate through TestDisk, use the Arrow and Page Up / Page Down.
•      To "Go to" Check your / s election / s press the Enter / Return key.
•      To return to the previous display or quit TestDisk, use the q key (Exit).
•      To save modifications under TestDisk, you must confirm with the key: y (Si) and / or login, and

     To actually written in the MBR partition data, you must choose from the menu, the "Write" selection and press the Enter key.

It doesn't recognize the partition, what I can do to recover the partition table or data?

If primary hard disk partition contains an operating system, chances are that you no longer bootingup- because the boot sector is damaged. If the hard drive is a secondary drive (data) or can connect to another computer in its secondary channel controller (usually where the CD / DVD is connected), the following symptoms would be observed:

     1. Windows Explorer or Disk Manager displays the first primary partition as "RAW" (unformatted) and Windows XP will display:, The unnidad x disk is not formatted would you like to format it now? and Windows Vista / 7/8 The drive is not formatted Do you want to format it?     [You should never do so without knowing why!]

In Linux appears with Linux mount command displays wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock
 
     2. A logical partition is missing. So in Windows Explorer logical drive is no longer available. The Disk Management Console for Windows now shows only "unallocated space" where once was located this logical partition.



What are the file systems you can find?
TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems:

•     BeFS (BeOS)
•     BSD disklabel (FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD)
•     CramFS, Tablets System Files
•     DOS / Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
•     Windows NTFS, SFS
•     HFS and HFS +, Hierarchical File System
•     JFS, IBM's Journal File System (JFS)
•     Linux ext2, ext3 and ext4
•     Linux Raid
•         RAID 1: Mirror
•         RAID 4: striped arrangements with device parity
•         RAID 5 arrays with distributed parity information striped
•         RAID 6: information duet arrangements with distributed redundancy scratched
•     Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
•     LVM and LVM2 Logical Volume Management Linux
•     Map of Mac partitions
•     Novell NSS Storage Service
•     ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4
•     Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
•     UFS and UFS2, Unix File System (Sun / BSD / ...)
•     XFS, SGI's Journal File System (JFS)