Testdisk
great piece of software recover data from a bad hard drive or a hard drive that has been accidentally formatted.
I discovered this software when I accidentally formatted my work laptop which was running Gentoo Linux. Its a long story as to how I formatted the hard drive but I didn’t have a backup of my data so I was basically screwed, or so I thought. I did some Google searches and came across Testdisk. Once I figured out how to use it I managed to restore my system back to the original Dell Windows XP installation. Yes that is correct it restored and booted. I realised that I restore to wrong data and thought that I was now really screwed but I fired up the software again and was able to total restore my Linux system. If memory serves me I had to reconfigure Grub but my system was restored and my data was safe. Needless to say I was very very happy. Sorry I don’t have many details on what I did to recover my data but it was over 3 years ago that I did this.
I am basically writing this post for two reason; 1) to let you know how awesome this software is and 2) I always forget the name of this software and it takes me 20-30 minutes to find it when I need it to recover data, so I am using this as a bookmark.
Here is a guide from Linux.com that gives you a run down on restoring data when you wipe your drive.
If you do use this software and are able to recover data please let me know, I like hearing the success stories.