Using TestDisk to conduct emergency recovery for Linux and Windows

Testdisk by CGSecurity is a useful toolkit to help. According to the TestDisk Website,

"TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy."

"In addition, it can

1. Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
2. Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
3. Rebuild FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 boot sector
4. Fix FAT tables
5. Rebuild NTFS boot sector
6. Recover NTFS boot sector from its backup
7. Fix MFT using MFT mirror
8. Locate ext2/ext3 Backup SuperBlock
9. Undelete files from FAT, NTFS and ext2 filesystem
10. Copy files from deleted FAT, NTFS and ext2/ext3 partitions. "

Testdisk is very useful expecially if you are dual-booting from both Linux and Windows and if accidentally deletion. a few listed tutorial from a much larger list.

1. Recover Damaged Hard Disks (bad sectors)
2. TestDisk Step-by-Step
3. Recovery of CD/DVD 

How to edit a read-only /etc/fstab during single-mode on CentOS

If somehow like me, you edited the /etc/fstab wrongly and have to enter the maintenance mode to rescue it but was not able to edit it.

For this blog entry, I'm writing on using a Linux CD to do a rescue.

Step 1: Put in the CentOS 5.4 CD and boot to CD

Step 2: Press F5 and type linux rescue at the boot prompt

linux rescue

Step 3: When given the command prompt again after a series of screen

# vi /mnt/sysimage/etc/fstab

Do the necessary changes to /etc/fstab
Step 4: Do the reboot

# reboot