TestDisk is one of those great little tools thats been around for a while. It started off in life as a tool to help recover lost partitions and and fix non-booting disks. Since then it’s grown somewhat and is now able to do a multitude of other useful things across a good selection of common disk formats; undeleting files, rebuilding FAT tables/bootsectors, to name just a few.
Despite knowing of many great little tools like TestDisk, its surprising how a simple change of context can simply wipe them from your memory. In the event of an iffy partition or disk TestDisk is just one of a few tools we go for. But strangely not if it was a virtual device.
Last week we needed to recover a screwed P2V conversion, because we quite simply didn’t have the time to redo the P2V process. The VHD was mountable, but Windows was telling us that it was simply dead, with no data. We sat there racking our brains until it was obvious: TestDisk! Why hadn’t we thought of it before?
We remounted the VHD, ran TestDisk against it, and as if by magic we were able to recover the NTFS partition.
So the moral here is don’t be a class A moron. Virtual devices aren’t always so different.
