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Well, my problem is that I was trying to make a Windows XP installer for a USB Flash Drive using WinToFlash. But when it was in the process of formatting the usb, a BSOD occurred and my PC can't boot into Windows anymore. After the BIOS thing it only shows a black screen with a "j". I think I somehow lost my partitions table because now it only shows a blank 2.0 TB HDD.

So, I have read about testdisk and gpart for recovering lost partitions, but I don't know which is best or what are the differences between them. I have like 6 NTFS partitions no ext3/ext4 or any other non-Windows format. Right now I'm using a live Ubuntu 11.10 USB.

So please, I would like to know, what do you recommend? Thank you very much in advance.

mrcrow85
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    This resource is dedicated to Q&A about Ubuntu and official derivatives. Unfortunately, neither Testdisk nor Gparted (let alone Windows) are among the derivatives, thus making your question off topic. – mikewhatever Mar 19 '13 at 15:55
  • Oh, sorry. Next time I will keep that in mind. – mrcrow85 Mar 19 '13 at 16:11
  • Have you tried using gparted > Device > attempt data rescue? Is more user friendly than testdisk. – Katu Aug 14 '17 at 08:05

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I know gparted now includes a way to recover partitions. I have tried it on one of my drives and yes it works. My test was simple. Deleted the partitioned and then tried to recover it with gparted. It worked.

Now, that was the only test I did with gparted. I have used recovery tools like testdisk (And photorec), foremost and scalpel. With testdisk I can actually say that even after formatting a partition 3 times, installing stuff on top of it and well, doing a lot of stuff on it, I could still recover a very old partition, almost entirely. I even tested a Windows XP partition that after recovering, booted up and everything was working. Windows did not know the difference.

So from experience and much trust put into testdisk, I would first go with this one. I know is not GUI like, but it has a very intuitive terminal menu that tells you step by step what to do or what it has found.

Luis Alvarado
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  • Ok, thanks for the input. One more question, from your experience how much time does it take for testdisk to scan a 2 TB HDD? – mrcrow85 Mar 19 '13 at 16:10
  • It is actually fast (Less than a minute for a 1TB HD). It is actually reading the sectors that had the information regarding the partition. It will show you the partitions that it can recover and if any look familiar then you got it. – Luis Alvarado Mar 19 '13 at 17:06
  • Thanks again. I have read lot of good things about testdisk. I think I will try it. – mrcrow85 Mar 19 '13 at 18:35
  • gparted is using gpart for its recovery work. – Baruch Even Nov 01 '13 at 17:12