Open Source Data Recovery - TestDisk

Sometime ago, I came across a useful file recovery tool. More recently, my sister got herself into some more major mischief with her laptop hard disk. The laptop wouldn't boot and Windows wouldn't read it. I was little stuck. There was a huge amount of data on it that she wanted back (she wasn't backing up - needless to say!).

After some fairly hefty hunting around I found TestDisk. It's open-source and runs from the command prompt. I downloaded it and sure enough, within a short amount of time I had all the necessary files off it.

One thing I found and couldn't work out how to change was that when files are restored, I could only restore them to the folder where TestDisk was running from. No biggy and no doubt that can be changed - I just couldn't find it...

Once all that was over, it took over 10 hours to format it! Even after formatting it, Windows wouldn't read it and kept prompting to format for me - I didn't ;)