TestDisk is a very good, completely free program designed to recover data on hard drives. The application is primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or to turn bootable discs on and off. The program can be run in DOS (also under Windows 9x, DOS-box) and on Windows (NT, 2000, XP, 2003), Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS and Mac OS.

TestDisk can be very helpful when we install some distributions as initial Linux users and suddenly it turns out that NTFS or FAT partitions have disappeared. Then TestDisk will help us, where recovery of partition tables is very easy. An additional PhotoRec utility for file recovery is included in the program.

- BeFS ( BeOS ) - BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD ) - CramFS, Compressed File System - DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 - HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System - JFS, IBM's Journaled File System - Linux Ext2 and Ext3 - Linux Raid (1, 4, 5, 6) - Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2) - LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager - Mac partition map - Novell Storage Services NSS - NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP/2003 ) - ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4 - Sun Solaris i386 disklabel - Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...) - XFS, SGI's Journaled File System