TestDisk 6.9 Release
February 20th, 2008
TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery program! 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).
PhotoRec is a File Recovery program designed to recover lost files; including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks, CDRom and lost pictures from digital camera memory (thus, its Photo Recovery name). PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it can still find files even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted (overwritten data, of course, can not be recovered).
You can download the latest version from https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download.
General Improvements
TestDisk & PhotoRec 6.9 comes with numerous improvements:
- They are compatible with ntfsprogs 2.0, the latest library version for accessing NTFS partitions.
- EFI GUID Partition Table is now supported. EFI GPT is mainly used on Itanium, MacBook and Mac Pro.
- Both utilities can use sudo if the user is not root, this functionality will be enabled for at least MacOSX, so users won't have to go into a command line.
- The MacOSX screen is also better supported.
- Improved Windows disk support, most internal USB card reader should now work.
- Disk model (ie. ATA ST3120026AS, _NEC DVD_RW ND-4550A...) are now reported under Linux.
TestDisk
- New file system support has been added: encrypted LUKS, Mac HFSX, Linux Raid md 1.0/1.1/1.2 (0.9 was already supported).
- UFS, UFS2 file systems are now identified better.
- TestDisk 6.9 now handles a Mac partition table partially overwritten by an Intel partition.
- It displays unicode filenames correctly, and can handle unicode filesnames while copying files from an NTFS partition when supported by the underlying libraries.
- TestDisk warns if the media is in read-only instead of read-write access.
- It's now possible to copy files from a lost FAT partition found by TestDisk (Already possible for NTFS).
- In the Advanced menu, TestDisk can create a raw/dd-like image of a partition.
PhotoRec
- For ext2/ext3 file systems, PhotoRec 6.9 can search in the whole space or in unallocated space only. This feature was already available for FAT and NTFS filesystem.
- It has better session support which allows a recovery to be stopped and restarted later.
- New file formats are supported: Acronis True Image .TIB, AutoCAD's .DWG and PowerTab .PTB, Cineon image file/SMTPE DPX .DPX, Comic Life .comicdoc, HP Photosmart Photo Printing Album .albm, KeepAssX .KDB, Maya .MB and .MP, Microsoft OneNOte .one file, Microsoft Visual Studio Resource file .RES, Microsoft VB's .CLS, Outlook .MSG, QuickBook .FST, SketchUp .SKP, Vmware .vmdk, WinSpec .SPE, Windows Enhanced MetaFile .emf, MS Windows Link .lnk, Internet Explorer index.dat, Macintosh Picture .pct, SunPCI Disk Image,XBOX GTA San Andreas Save File, Final Cut Pro .fcp and Digital Speech Standard .dss.
- It fixes Mac Address Book and Outlook 64-bits .PST recovery; also NTFS 'free space' recovery.
- Support for .MOV, .ZIP, FastTrackerII Extended Module .XM and ACE archive has been improved.