How in the Tech

Recover Lost Partitions and Subsequently Lost Files

By Adam Myers ⋅ January 29, 2009 ⋅ Tags: File Management, System Administration

Previously I wrote about Pandora Recovery, a free tool that scans your harddrive in search of files that were accidentally deleted but were still recoverable. If you’ve ever lost a file that you know you have no backup for, you know the immediate panic that sinks into your chest. Now, imagine if you’ve lost an entire partition? It happens; it’s happened to me a few times. A partition table is defined by only a few small bits on information on the physical harddrive and the residing filesystem above it. A system crash or some random piece of malware is all it takes to lose 100s of gigabytes of data in a flash. Just about the only thing worse than this situation is turning on your computer one morning only to hear a nice clunk clunk noise as your harddrive attempts to spin up. While you may fully be in trouble in the latter situation, there is a solution to the previous solution that will hopefully allow you to recover anything and everything lost.

Partition Find & Mount is a utility that bares the functionality derived from it’s name. Once installed and executed, a quick Scan of the system will reveal all the visible and found partitions on each harddrive. The found partition is likely the partition you thought was lost forever. Once identified, Partition Find & Mount allows you to mount the crashed partition where you then can safely move the files elsewhere. While the software can not actually repair the partition trouble, it does do the job with respect to data recovery. One caveat, Partition Find & Mount comes in two versions – a free and a pro. The free version is available for home user and the data recovery speed is limited to just 512KB/s – rather slow if you must recover multiple gigabytes of data! The Pro version has neither restriction. Still, can you really put a fixed dollar price on the value of your data?