A great freeware that saved the day.
I had a task, to install Some application on a rack-mounted server. I don't usually carry CDs of those application cause its unreliable so I had a soft-copy made on my portable 2.5 inch 80GB External USB Hard Disk.
After Installing Windows 2003 STD Server over Redhat Linux server. I plug in my 80GB External HDD. I then released that I had to install a web server on a different rack-mounted server, so I switched to the other server and continued with its installation.
Now when I switched back to the previous server I went into "Disk Management" and checked out what HDDs were attached. I saw a there were two, A. a 65GB SCSI HDD and B. a 78GB HDD. Then I thought that this was an extra HDD and I right click the partition and deleted it. OMG, wasn't that my 80 GB External HDD.
F#&$ F#&$ F#&%.
What a stupid mistake? what am I going to do? I had lots of important data and my application server setup was in there. OK relax. I quickly got hold of another PC and searched Google for some answers for my dilemma. And I did.
TestDisk from CGSecurity was my answer to my prayers. It only uses a DOS interface which also work in Windows (There is a different version if you want to run in DOS, etc). In my case the 'Windows' version will do.
This app only took 5 ~ 10 minutes to recover and find the partition. And once you try to exit it it asked to save the changes, I said 'Yes' and It did it. It recovered by HDD back. Thank God.
After reviewing this app further it is interesting to note that the application is able to do many more, example recover boot sectors and repair MFT (using MFT mirror). and supports many file systems and Operating Systems such as Windows, Linux , Mac, etc. I really recommend this application to anyone so please go ahead and try it.
