Installation of necessary toolsĮither you are using a bootable Live system like KNOPPIX that is shipped with all tools needed, or install them manually on your machine: The amount of possible lost data is approximately 40 GB of pictures/videos and 1 GB of documents like.

“The drive is not formatted, do you want to format it now?” Of course, Windows nor Ubuntu is able to mount the disk anymore and the Disk Manager displays the first primary partition as RAW, with Windows prompting: OMG! A friend dropped a 2 TB WD elements external harddrive while it was connected to the PC with active write operations. Follow the steps below only if your data is not crucial to you. I take no responsibility for the loss of any data. This is my take on recovering data from my friends broken hard drive. Warranty: I am not a professional in data recovery.

I had to recover data from a broken external hard drive and my typical go to recovery software failed ( TestDisk), because the disk’s hardware was severely damaged. PhotoRec can recover data from various filesystems including FAT, NTFS and HFS+.Introduction to Data Recovery with free Unix Tools PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted. PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. It will also find accidentally deleted partitions (either Apple Partitions, the newer EFI partitions and Windows MBR Partitons) and provide the necessary information for you to restore them using the Apple pdisk command (for Apple Partitions) or the gpt command for (for EFI partitions) The TestDisk program is powerful free data recovery software! 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 a Partition Table). As a result, these programs are designed for support personnel and experienced Mac users. They are used on the command line in the Terminal. TestDisk download contains TWO programs - TestDisk and PhotoRec.

Testdisk photo recovery