Excellent Data Recovery Program!

[crunchy_pickle (5)]

Wow!!!

As much as I have been pissing and moaning over Linux woes over the years, and various issues I've had to deal with I have to say that I am very impressed with the Linux community today....

A while back, I decided to try out a trial version of Windows XP 64 bit edition. Well, once the trial expired without warning, and my belief that I had 30 more days, I could no longer boot into it for more than an hour. Not much data recovery time there. Most of my stuff was already on 2 separate FAT32 drives for storage so I just decided to reinstall. Well after many issues, I decided to stick with Linux for a while, and lost one of my FAT32 partitions. I managed to totally destroy my partition table for this drive as well.

Anyways, recently I've really wanted to recover these files. I once tried TestDisk in Linux, but found it kind of intimidating at first, and really didn't want to risk further destroying my lost files. I tried quite a few other programs, and they seemed to take a very long time, and while one of them showed me my lost files, it required $100 registration to recover them. That kinda sucked, and I really didn't want to pay that kind of money, for something I know I can do.

Anyways, I try TestDisk one more time in Windows. I gather up the courage and plug away for a minute. After creating the log file, analyzing the disk, and doing a deeper scan which took all of 5 minutes, I selected the selected I needed with the down arrow key, hit p to list files to make sure I had the right partition selected and used the left and right arrows to change the D listed before the partition to a P making it a primary rather than deleted partition. I hit enter, and the next screen gives me the option to write. Scary. Well, I hit write which writes a new partition table based on the info I provided and VOILA!!!

A simple reboot and my partition is up and running for the first time in over 6 months..... You have no idea how happy this makes me!!!!

This software can be found here for those who need it ever. It is free, and it is very fast! If you ever need help with it feel free to contact me.

TestDisk - www.cgssecurity.org

Brief Tutorial - TestDisk HowTo