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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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1 Answers1

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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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