TestDisk, Data Recovery

TestDisk is OpenSource software and is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL v2+).

TestDisk is 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/ext4 Backup SuperBlock
• Undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
• Copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 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.

Operating systems

TestDisk can run under

• DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
• Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP, Windows Server 2016/2012/2008/2003
• Linux,
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
• SunOS and
• MacOS X

  Filesystems

  TestDisk can find lost partitions for all of these file systems:

  • BeFS ( BeOS )
  • BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
  • CramFS, Compressed File System
  • DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
  • XBox FATX
  • Windows exFAT
  • HFS, HFS+ and HFSX, Hierarchical File System
  • JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
  • Linux btrfs
  • Linux ext2, ext3 and ext4
  • Linux GFS2
  • Linux LUKS encrypted partition
  • Linux RAID md 0.9/1.0/1.1/1.2
    • RAID 1: mirroring
    • RAID 4: striped array with parity device
    • RAID 5: striped array with distributed parity information
    • RAID 6: striped array with distributed dual redundancy information
  • Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
  • LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
  • Mac partition map
  • Novell Storage Services NSS
  • NTFS ( Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7 )
  • ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4
  • Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
  • Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
  • XFS, SGI's Journaled File System
  • Wii WBFS
  • Sun ZFS