TestDisk is a free open source software which helps recovering data from a corrupt usb flash drive. Recently my flash drive got corrupted, and was asking to be formatted under windows once plugged in. I tried opening the pen drive under several operating systems including windows xp, vista, windows 7, fedora, ubuntu etc. But in most of them, “Insert a Disk into drive x” and “Drive is not formatted” error was popping up.
As the data in my removable drive was not that critical, I started experimenting with different free data recovery softwares. Out of them, TestDisk, turned out to be the best in recovering my lost FAT32 partition.
TestDisk Features:
Fix partition table and recover lost/deleted partition
Rebuild/Recover FAT32 boot sector
Fix FAT Tables
Rebuild/Recover NTFS boot sector
Undelete files from fat, ntfs and ext2 filesystem
Copy files from deleted partitions
Supported Operating systems: DOS, Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, Linux, MacOS X etc
How to Recover Files using TestDisk:
Common symptoms or errors seen when a drive gets corrupted is, Windows Explorer shows primary partition as raw or unformatted and Windows prompts this error message.
“The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?”
To recover a partition or repair a file system, you must run TestDisk with full administrator privileges. In Windows Vista, right click Testdisk.exe and select “run as administrator” option.
To recover partition from a media image or repair a filesystem image, run
testdisk image.dd to create a raw disk image
testdisk image.E01 to recover files from an Encase EWF image
testdisk 'image.*' if the Encase image is split into several files.
If the partition was reformatted into other file system use these steps given below:
run TestDisk,
select the hard disk and the partition type
choose Advanced
select the partition
choose Type,
enter the value corresponding to the previous filesystem
choose Boot
choose RebuildBS
List
If you can see your files, choose Write and confirm
In Analyse, choose to rewrite the partition with the correct partition typ
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