The hardware that makes up our equipment is made up of a good many pieces that make them work correctly. When one of them breaks, we have no other option than to buy a new one, without greater harm than spending more. Unfortunately, having a hard drive crash is much worse .
The hard drives that we have in our computer are responsible for storing all kinds of information, whether it is the most trivial or logically very important files that we may not even have stored in the cloud. Not only that, but also one of them (if we have several) is responsible for executing our operating system , and if it stops working, our computer will not be of much use to us if we do not solve it. This may be due to a specific failure or because we were responsible for deleting a partition, for example. If that is what has happened to you, we bring you a free and simple solution that will get you out of trouble: TestDisk.
What is TestDisk for?
This program is open source, and is designed to help all users who have had problems with their hard drives because they have deleted key information or because they have stopped booting (as long as it is not a physical problem with the hard drive). , Sure). The program lacks a traditional interface as we may be used to, since when we run it we will interact with it through the Windows Terminal .
TestDisk interface
As the program’s own website explains, TestDisk is capable of performing the following tasks :
- Repair partition table
- Recover partitions that have been deleted by the user
- Recover boot sectors, both from FAT32 or NTFS drives
- Rebuild FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 sectors
- Repair the MFT
- Rebuild NTFS Boot Sectors
- Locate the ext2/ext3/ext4 Backup Superblock
As you can see, TestDisk is capable of solving a multitude of errors that could be making your hard drive not work as it should, but it is also designed to be compatible with practically any file system that exists , as well as with the most popular operating systems. used as Windows, Linux or even MacOS. It should be added that it is not only designed for traditional hard drives (or HDDs), but that we can use it with the most modern SSDs or even with USB sticks.
How to use TestDisk
As we have mentioned before, TestDisk does not have a user interface like other more traditional applications, but that is not why we should be afraid of it. The reality is that it is an application with the most intuitive operation, and learning how it works will not take us more than a few minutes in any case. Once we have the program window open on our desktop, we will start by clicking on Create to work with a new work log. By doing so, all the hard drives that we have connected to our computer will appear on the screen, and we will have to choose the one that is suffering from a problem.
TestDisk will show all your disks
Once the disk in question has been selected, we will have to select the type of partition table that this disk has. If you do not have much computer knowledge, it is very likely that you will not know what to choose, but do not worry about it. The same program will indicate the type of table that your disk has , so you will only have to select the one indicated in green at the bottom of the screen.
Once this is done, TestDisk will give us a series of options with which to interact with the hard disk, and in any case the most recommended thing is that we always choose Analyze first, since in this way the program will be able to detect if there is any problem On the disk. If the program doesn’t detect your hard drive, or gives you some kind of error when analyzing, it may be due to a physical error, in which case, and unfortunately, we won’t be able to do anything with TestDisk.
All we can do with the program