(Solved) Hard Drive Recovery Program

[Ferdes Fides]

When using Testdisk it is telling me my head count is incorrect and I have a bad relative
sector

Well I think the error was my drive (flashdrive).  Deleted the drive, recreated the drive,
reformatting, and reinstalling everything, including grub, it now reads 255 heads everyplace
with no remarks from Testdisk about a bad relative sector or anything else.   Not 246 heads as previous.  Amazing, I deleted this drive previously before installing PCL from a backup to this
single partition drive and completed that without error message or operating problem.

Anyway, just need to request a package upgrade to keep the thread's info current.

[Just18]

Had the opportunity to use Testdisk again today after some time ....  well more of a necessity.

Laptop that had been brought to a service centre, from where a new laptop was being purchased, so that the user data could be transferred.

Yeah! Right!
No user data owner told as the disk had crashed and needed to be replaced. Tough!

Landed to me ....  Put PCLOS USB in and booted ....  checked .....  HDD had no Partition Table!

WTH!

So using testdisk, it picked up the last set of partitions and I wrote the partition table.

Something wrong ....  after much looking and trying ....  ran the disgnostic tool that was on the Dell Utility partition and HDD OK.

Looked for user data and found none ....  in fact the install seemed new!  

Checked the drive in Local Disks to discover a huge empty space in the middle of it!  

Ran Testdisk again, did a deep scan, while I worked out what the partitions *should* look like, according to the info I had picked up.

Tes it took some time .....  but the original partitions were found. All four of them .....  Dell Utility, Recovery, OS and something called MediaDirect.

Rebooted to see if it would fire up, but no.

So ran PCLOS again and recovered ALL the user data from the OS partition.

This laptop had Vista installed ....     .....

Don;t know what will happen to it now .....  I won't install Windows on it anyway    if they want Linux i will do that, else they are on their own again

I did try to see if the machine would boot from the Vista disk that came with it ....  had to unseal the package to get it .....  but no .....  won't fire up .....  I had thought I might repair the install.

They can have it back tomorrow.

Testdisk to the rescue ......  yet again .....  

regards.
Dell Inspiron Amd X64 with 2GB RAM

[Ferdes Fides]

Testdisk to the rescue ......  yet again .....  

I'm convinced, always see what Testdisk is talking about.