Ontrack EasyRecovery is also very useful (and simpler to use that R-Studio) to recover lost or simply deleted partitions. It's a serious tool, if you actually know what you're doing with it - but it will NOT do data recovery. It is very effective given its size, but most people dismiss it as a gimmick because of the reputation it has. It's a hard drive diagnostic tool, nothing more in reality. At that point you have copied all the bits you are going to get.įor recovery of specific areas of a hard drive ('zones' you can define based on actual cluster locations), R-Studio pretty much stands alone but it ain't cheap.Īs for SpinRite, it's not a data recovery application, it never has been, it never will be, but people still seem to think that's precisely what it is. DO NOT CONTINUE UNLESS YOU ARE CERTAIN OF WHICH DRIVE IS WHICH.Ĥ) (Not necessary) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ bs=16M (This will write 0's on every spot of the drive)ĥ) ddrescue -no-split /dev/ /dev/ logfile (Grab everything, if bad spot found write to logfile and keep trying the rest of the disk)Ħ) ddrescue -direct -max-retries=3 /dev/ /dev/ logfile (Look at the logfile and grind away on the bad spots)ħ) ddrescue -direct -retrim -max-retries=3 /dev/ /dev/ imagefile logfile (same as #6, but try in a different direction)Ĩ) Repeat #6 and #7 until your error size is not really reducing. Everything on this drive will be erased.ģ) fdisk -l (This will show you what drives are seen by the system and their locations (usually /dev/sda, sdb, sdc) from this point, bad disk will be /dev/ and destination will be /dev/. Overall, what is the best course of action one should take in such situations?ġ) Connect drive to computer that you will backup to. What other good bootable software I can use? I'm lazy to pull the drive out of the laptop and hook it to another pc and try other windows based recovery software to try to recover the files.

I'm not an expert in testdisk, but what else can I do? I think I just need to rebuild the partition table in order for the OS to see the files. It was able to find the HP recovery partition but nothing else even after I ran the deeper search. I booted using Parted magic cd and ran testdisk. I don't want to recreate the partitions of course, that will make it harder I think. I tested the drive using various tools and it passed with no errors.

Anyways, it contained data and there comes another data recovery issue. According to its user, it was only partitioned into C. All of the sudden, one HP laptop decided to make its whole drive into unallocated space.

Spinrite 6 hard disk size limit