Many thanks fly to Christophe Grenier http://www.cgsecurity.org/ for having developed such good and useful OpenSource tools for linux licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

I’m talking about TestDisk and PhotoRec

Quote: Testdisk can recover your partitions, but in case you run into trouble, you can use parted to fine-tune your partitions. Parted also has a “rescue lost partitions” function that is very useful.

TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.

TestDisk can find lost partitions for many file systems, among others:

* 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 Swap (versions 1 and 2)
* LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
* Mac partition map
* NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP/2003/Vista )
* 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

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License. PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. You can download them from this link.

For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory support you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.