The nightmare scenario: your computer won't boot. The drive seems healthy otherwise; you can access it when booting from another drive, but for some reason your drive absolutely refuses to boot. Take heart, it's possible that it can be fixed by TestDisk, a very powerful cross-platform partition recovery tool.

TestDisk was created to try to help users recover from seemingly unrecoverable scenarios. There are many things that can happen, due to either user error, or nefarious software that can cause a drive to become unbootable, but still otherwise contain all the same data. TestDisk can handle the majority of these situations. Amazingly, TestDisk can handle a massive list of file systems, and can be run under any of the following environments:

• DOS (either real or in a Windows 9x DOS-box),
• Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003),
• Linux,
• FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
• SunOS and
• MacOS

While it's not something to play with casually, TestDisk is exactly the kind of utility you want around when you run into trouble.