However they all cost money and I would guess that very few are any more effective than (if even “as effective as”) TestDisk. There are a mix of other tools out there which can recover data from a dead drive with varying degrees of success. So first order of business was to use a Princess Bride reference and ask… Is it “mostly dead” or “all dead?” Because with mostly dead… well that means the drive is still slightly alive, and that means you might be able to take a visit to Miracle Max, in this case a free (as in free) application called TestDisk. If this were a newer SSD drive then perhaps the situation would be more dire, but on old magnetic disks those shiny spinning platters (typically) still hold all of your precious data, it’s just hard to get to. That’s a bad day… especially when you realize that you may have some important documents and pictures of one of your children shortly after they were born (that aren’t kept anywhere else) that are now gone forever…īut are they gone forever? In this case, the drive in question was a “not all that old” 2 TB “spinning rust” 7200 RPM SATA drive. Then a few days ago I heard that short squealing whine of death and Windows then informed me that my hard drive had no partitions and was empty of data… I had that moment happen to me this past week… I knew it was coming but, like so many of you I said to myself “I probably have a few more months before it’s an issue”… Yep, my hard drive software warned me of impending doom on one of my data drives.

Linux testdisk recover files