Let us now discuss about a few free data recovery tools. TestDisk is Open Source data rescue software that is licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a highly powerful free data recovery tool. The tool was primarily designed to help recover lost hard drive partitions and to make non-booting disks bootable again. The tool can provide protection to data loss from viruses, faulty software installation, and accidental deletion. With TestDisk, you can easily recover lost partition tables. Following are some of the activities that TestDisk can easily accomplish the following:
• Fix deleted partition table
• Recover and rebuild FAT32 boot sector from the backup
• Fix FAT tables
• Recover and rebuild NTFS boot sector
• Use MFT mirror to fix MFT
• Undelete files from FAT, NTFS, and ext 2 file system
• Copy files from deleted FAT and NTFS partitions
TestDisk is highly user-friendly. It has features that suit both novices and experts. TestDisk has features that can collect the necessary information from people who don’t know much about data rescue. People familiar with data recovery concepts will find the tool even more helpful for onsite data recovery. The tool can run under the following OS platforms:
• DOS
• Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista)
• Linux
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• Sun operating system
• Mac operating system
Let us now discuss a little bit about PhotoRec, a data rescue software designed to recover lost video, audio, and document files. The tool can recover lost data from hard drives, CD-ROMs and even digital camera memory. PhotoRec works beneath the file system and tries to detect the underlying data. Therefore, the tool is equipped to work well even if the file system is severely damaged or reformatted.
Most importantly, PhotoRec is free; it is distributed under the GNU General Public license. For safety reasons, PhotoRec uses read-only access to recover lost data. One thing you need to remember while working with PhotoRec is that– never save any new data after you discover that your files have been deleted accidentally. You might run the risk of overwriting your lost data on the disk or memory card and then PhotoRec will find it difficult, if not impossible, to recover the lost data. This tool works under the following platforms:
• DOS
• Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista)
• Linux
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
• Sun Solaris
• Mac Operating System X
Besides TestDisk and PhotoRec, there are several other free file recovery tools, such as, Recuva, Undelete Plus, PC Inspector File recovery, Scalpel, MagicRescue etc.