TestDisk

TestDisk is a command line utility to do data recovery on hard disk partitions.

It is developed by Christophe Grenier in the C programming language and distributed as free software in the source code under the terms of version 2 or later of the GNU General Public License ( GPL) as a set with the carving software PhotoRec. For all popular Linux distributions it can be installed directly to the package management from the standard repositories.

Supported Operating Systems

TestDisk runs on the following operating systems:

  • DOS: FreeDOS, Windows 9x or DOSBox
  • Microsoft Windows
  • Linux
  • BSD
  • Oracle Solaris
  • Mac OS X

Supported File Systems

TestDisk recognizes the following types of partition tables:

  • Apple Partition Map
  • GUID Partition Table
  • PC / Intel partition table in the master boot record
  • Solaris disk label

It can also deal with unpartitioned disks.

Partition Recovery

TestDisk use the BIOS or operating system in order to read the hard drive can. TestDisk can

  • Recover deleted partitions
  • Partition table recovery
  • Recreate the Master Boot Record (MBR )

TestDisk examines the structure and integrity of a hard drive. Then it looks for non-listed in the MBR partitions. The following file systems are recognized:

  • BSD disklabel
  • CRAMFS Compressed File System
  • DOS / Windows FAT 12, 16 and 32
  • Windows exFAT
  • HFS, HFS , HFSX and, Hierarchical File System
  • JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
  • Linux ext2, ext3, ext4 and
  • Linux soft RAID (RAID 1, RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 6)
  • Linux Swap ( versions 1 and 2)
  • LVM and LVM2, Linux
  • Novell Storage Services ( NSS)
  • NTFS ( Windows NT)
  • 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

File system repair and file recovery

TestDisk can repair the following file systems or recover deleted files from it:

  • FAT ( FAT12, FAT16, FAT32)
  • NTFS
  • Ext (ext2, ext3, ext4 )
  • HFS
Software maintainer File carving Be File System BeOS Logical Volume Manager (Linux)
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