For the past three days I was trying to rescue a damaged disk of my colleague. I already knew about a great disk cloning tool called ddrescue in Linux. So this was the first step I did. After 20 hours of work the clone has been created, but with some errors during read. I was hoping that I will be able to boot from it after I put it back to the PC, but in this case there was some problem with the partition table, so Windows has not been even be able to recognize it as NTFS, even though Linux did!
I didn’t want to reinstall the system after so much hours spend on this, so I was looking for some other tools which could help me save the disk. There was a lot of suggestions on using some paid software, but I don’t have good experience with them.
Finally I found another great open source software called TestDisk. It is a command line tool, but I don’t care much if it helps 🙂 Using this software I was able to recreate the partition table, after it found the lost NTFS partition and as soon as I restarted PC, Windows finally fixed the NTFS using chkdsk.