Best FREE Software for recovering a partition?

[lettuce]

So i stupidly deleted a partition on 1 of my harddisk that i didnt want to, can anyone recommended a good free software that can recover this partition for me?

 

[lettuce]

Thanks!!

 

[lettuce]

Ok, Photorec seems to finding the files/folders on the deleted partition (its still searching 3hrs and going) but from what has been found so far the directory structure doesnt seem to be intact neither are the file names (they are all number and letters) once the seach has finally finished is the directory structure and files/folder names correctly presented as they were or will they always been just randomly generated names??.

This could be a problem seeings as its a 1TB drive with lots of files so im never going to know whats what if the file names are not what they used to be??

Also at the moment the whole drive is in a unallocated state I didn't want to set the drive up as a 'new simple drive' in the fear of overwriting info on the drive, should I bet setting the drive up or leaving it unallocated?, as programs such as Recuva don't appear to be able to see the drive as I'm guess it's in a unallocated state!??

 

[lettuce]

Photorec doesn't recover filenames. If all you've done is deleted the partition TestDisk will most probably recover it for you, it's by the same people.

You may want to clone the entire disk before you do any work on it if you want to be super safe. The recommended option is to use dd which is a Linux command though I believe TestDisk will let you generate it too. It's a 1:1 backup, so if you have a 1TB drive you'll need 1TB of storage. You can write the file back to the disk if you need to, or use the .dd as the file you recover the data from. It's quite handy if you have a drive that's showing signs of dieing to work on a 1:1 copy of it anyway.

Im actually using QPhotorec, which i thought was just a GUI of TestDisk, is that not correct then?

Im guessing i wont need to make a clone of the drive as currently its unallocated state so nothing can get written to it?

 

[lettuce]

TestDisk wasnt able to recover the info on the partition, QPhotoRec was able to but the directory structure was completely lost and all files had randomly generated names so sadly that wasnt any good.

I did however use, Lazesoft Data Recovery 4.3 Home Edition which successfully found all info and keep the directory structure