Recovering of Partition Table Information

One of the most nasty things happened while shrinking drives is this unreadable partition. Sometimes this also could happen, if you accidentally cleanED (using windows DISKPART) a disk. At first when I thought it was deleted, it is a 500GB hard disk, so you can imagine how much information it holds. I tried to get a cup of coffee and convinced myself that "Hey, it is not all deleted. No computer can delete such file size in a few seconds. If you want to delete a Hard Disk without a trace, you have to switch 1 and 0 per 8 bits of a byte of that 500 gigabytes." Thus, I decided to spend this night sleepless, trying to recover the data.

Searching on the internet is hard. I tried many softwares there, and sadly some are hijacked with virus, rootkits and some even tried to write a function after few months to mess my drive's partition table after uninstall. I also installed some "promising" softwares, but in the end they won't allow you to fix your partition table.

Good thing, I'm able to find this good tool called TestDisk. At first it is hard to use and after trying all those crapwares, I already lose hope, but TestDisk worked like a charm. From the damaged partition, it can even extract files back and also fix the partition that I accidentally cleanED using the diskpart tool. After analyzing the disk partition, it will write a new one and instruct you to restart it to take effect. On my case, it is a removable device. Simply unplug, plug, found new device and WHOA! the files are there.

and the best thing about this, it is FREE! Thanks to the genius behind this Open Source Project.