Remnants of partitions

TestDisk may show partition data which is simply from the remnants of a partition that had been deleted and overwritten long ago. Because of this possibility, one should always give each new partition a unique label name. Whenever you decide to delete all existing partitions on a drive in order to 'start all over again,' you should 'zero-out' every byte on the disk first. That procedure will remove all remnants of previously existing partitions (HDD manufacturers often have free utility programs to 'zero-out' a drive in the downloads section of their web sites). If one isn't available, or if you're not removing all of the partitions from a drive, you could at the very least 'defrag' the drive, or use a 'wipe free space' utility after you installed a new OS or resized any of the drive's partitions.

Important Tip:

As we mentioned above, TestDisk could easily find remnants of partitions you purposely deleted long ago. In order to make the recovery of lost partitions (that you do want to recover!) less confusing, each time you alter the structure of your hard drive (by deleting, creating or resizing a partition) you should run a utility program that shows you exactly where all of your existing partitions are located then save that data in a safe place (not on the HDD, since you might not be able to access it when needed!). There are three versions of Partition Info by PQ (now Symantec) at their FTP site here. PartInNT.zip is for NT/2k/XP etc., PartIn9x.zip for Win 9x/Me and partinfo.zip for DOS; which could be useful. For Linux users, it's quite easy to run fdisk -l and see a listing of all your existing partitions. You can also make a copy of your MBR sector, or the whole first track of any HDD, using the 'dd' program like this:

dd if=/dev/hda of=HDA1stTrack.bin bs=512 count=63

which will save the first 63 sectors of your first IDE drive to the file HDA1stTrack.bin. To save only the MBR sector, use a count of just 1. Copy the files to a couple floppy diskettes, don't forget to print out a listing of your partitions for safe keeping.

Also note that TestDisk itself can be run at any time (just be sure to Quit rather than save its MBR to disk!) and set to save a log file (/log switch) of all the partitions it finds. Once you identify your existing partitions in its log file, this info could be very useful if you ever need to recover a partition in the future.

SMART

It is possible to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.

Linux users can use Smartmontools

Norton GoBack && TestDisk

Norton GoBack (previously known as Wildfile GoBack, Adaptec GoBack, Roxio GoBack) is a Microsoft Windows based disk utility. If you run Windows version of TestDisk, you need to disable or uninstall GoBack first to be able to Write a new partition table.

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