TestDisk & PhotoRec
Recovers lost partitions, makes non-booting disks bootable again, and undeletes files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext filesystems.
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3 more ways to get TestDisk & PhotoRec
Other download sites
Run by third parties, not by CGSecurity (Christophe Grenier). Prefer the official page above when it works.
Package managers
- Chocolatey
choco install testdisk - Homebrew
brew install testdisk
About TestDisk & PhotoRec
TestDisk repairs the damage that makes a disk look empty when the data is still there. It fixes partition tables and recovers deleted partitions, rebuilds FAT and NTFS boot sectors or restores them from their backups, repairs FAT tables and MFT records from the mirror, and locates backup superblocks on ext2, ext3 and ext4.
PhotoRec comes with it and does the opposite job: it ignores the filesystem entirely and carves files out of the raw disk by recognising their signatures, which is what you use when the filesystem is gone rather than damaged. Both are command-line tools with a text menu, both are free under the GPL, and both work on Windows, macOS, Linux and even DOS.
Strengths
- Recovers deleted partitions and fixes partition tables, which restores everything at once
- Rebuilds FAT and NTFS boot sectors and repairs the MFT from its mirror
- PhotoRec carves files by signature when the filesystem itself is unrecoverable
- Builds for Windows, macOS, Linux and DOS, and it runs from a live USB
Limitations
- A text menu interface that is genuinely intimidating under pressure
- Easy to make things worse if you do not understand what you are confirming
- PhotoRec recovers file contents but not file names or folder structure
- The last stable release is from February 2024
Details
- Pricing
- Free · Free and open source under the GNU General Public Licence.
- License
- GPL-3.0
- Developer
- CGSecurity (Christophe Grenier)
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Getting data back from a drive whose partitions have vanished or been deleted
- Categories
- Disk and USB tools
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Selected from the TechWalrus downloads catalog (Disk & USB); facts checked against the developer's own pages, 2 sources on file.