Linux App FinderTestDisk is a Great Recovery Tool
Submitted by chadm on Wed, 2010-06-09 14:47.
TestDisk is a great tool for recovering files from a broken disk. My wife's hard drive crashed yesterday and it turned out to be a corrupt boot sector. I booted to a Kubuntu Live USB and was able to use TestDisk to recover the MBR from the backup (it was NTFS which keeps a backup at a different part of the drive) and copy the files I needed to a USB key.
It has a command line interface, but you simply run "sudo testdisk" and there is a guided menu based approach after that.
If you are having any hard drive issues it's a good first place to start.
RAID card fail
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2010-09-02 22:25.
My RAID card killed my partitions per this post http://ideapumpkin.blogspot.com/2010/09/i-love-you-testdisk.html and TestDisk brought them back to life! My new fave partition tool!!
After a boot cr(a)ush...
Submitted by dragon on Thu, 2010-06-17 17:20.
Recently I was the target of expert anti-free-speech government hackers hellbent on stopping my "greenpeaceish" Internet noise about "humanity killing this planet".. I found installing Ubuntu with the existing Ubuntu OS created a dual-boot that over-rode the kill-boot bugs they hit my hd with...
I discovered that "free-speech" really doesn't exist, except on federal waste paper...
What would be nice in a rescue disk would be something that adds dual-boot feature quickly, without adding the new OS side by side, but fakes dual-boot to the existing system, thereby overriding the boot bugs...
Is there an "Ubuntu rescue disk"?..
Teskdisk is awesome
Testdisk has saved my butt on numerous occasions, a combination of my own inattention, things just going wrong, and even an XP install deciding that it would format my ext3 storage drive instead of the drive I told it to. In the case of the latter, despite the drive undergoing a full-format to NTFS, it managed to recover all my files, nearly a terabyte drive full of of them, and give me back my ext3 partition. It's one thing I swear by. :)