How to Restore a Lost / Deleted Partition of Hard Disk Drive


If you have deleted the boot partition of your hard disk drive by mistake and there  is  important data on  it, Can it be restored? You can always restore partition and recover data using a free data recovery software like TestDisk.  It  is a free open source program and is very efficient. We recently discussed How to Restore a Deactivated / Missing CD/DVD Drive [Troubleshoot]

TestDisk has been developed with  the intention of  restoring  lost or mistakenly deleted partitions. The program  repairs the partition  table as well as  the boot sector and also  rewrites  the Master Boot Record (MBR)  if  required. The most important  thing  is you can  run  it using a boot floppy, CD or a USB stick, this is important in cases like this, in which boot partitions are affected. Navigation in TestDisk takes is performed using the arrow keys. Actions are confirmed by pressing  [Enter].

 Test Disk

Features of Test Disk..

  • 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 Super Block
  • Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 file system
  • Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions.

Important:

Actual changes to your hard disk are executed by  the program only if you confirm with [Enter], [Y], and  ‘OK’. With the option labeled ‘Proceed’, an analysis first  takes place. The present status can and should be saved using  the ‘Save’ button.

TestDisk shows  the hard disk  info as CHS (Cylinders, Heads, Sectors) after a verification started with ‘Search’. This is  followed by  its  total size  in MB. What is  important  is  the first character of the output  line: ‘*’ means primary and active as boot partition, ‘P’  is primary but not bootable, ‘L’  is a logical drive, and ‘D’  indicates  the partition has been deleted. Selected the deleted partition, place  it on  ‘P’ using  the  right/left-arrow keys and save with  ‘Write’.

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