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Hard Disk Recovery

My WD external hard disk wasn't getting detected by windows. Upon looking up at Disk Management in Computer Management, I found out that the disk was made unallocated. This was troublesome since it was working fine a day ago.


After a few hits on Google, I came across a utility named TestDisk. It's an open source application which diagnoses hard-disks, recover data and correct disk errors. The official website describes the software as this --
TestDisk 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). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.
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/ext4 Backup SuperBlock
  • Undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
  • Copy files from deleted FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3/ext4 partitions.
 I used this software and voila! the my lost partitions were back to life.

 
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