Recover your lost disk

Sometimes when trying to boot your machine it just happens that the machine just doesn't boot. Everything else seems to be working fine and whats more is that you can use another drive or a bootable CD/DVD to boot your machine but not your default disk drive. Also, sometimes it happens that your disk stores backup of some very important files. For this all is not lost and there is still some hope left. You can try using TestDisk.

TestDisk is a cross platform, open-source and free software which you can use to recover your disk. 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 your Partition Table).

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 Backup SuperBlock

and it supports:

• DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
• Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
• Linux,
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
• SunOS
• MacOS

Overall TestDisk is a great utility to handle rough situations like disk failures.