The name would suggest that it can only be used to recovery digital pictures but that is not the case. PhotoRec can recovery and kind of data on a drive providing that it has not been overwritten yet.

Windows users need to start photorec-win.exe after unpacking the application to a local directory. That makes PhotoRec a portable application on Windows.

The program displays a list of devices that the application can scan for deleted data. PhotoRec will only display internal hard drives if the program is started with elevated rights (right-click the program and selected run as administrator to do that). The program supports a variety of file systems including FAT, NTFS, EXT2/EXT3 and HFS+.

A device can be selected with the arrow keys and pressing enter after the selection has been made. It is then necessary to select a partition type on the next screen. This may pose troubles for inexperienced computer users. The default one is usually correct and should be selected as PhotoRec auto-detects the partition table type.

The source partition has to be selected in the next step, and then the file system of that partition. The default values are usually correct. Finally, the destination for recovered files needs to be selected. Users can configure some options to configure the file types that should be recovered or if corrupted or partial files should be recovered.

The analysis of the file system can take a while depending on the size of the disk It is usually not a good idea to run the program on a large disk, as there is no option to select specific file types for recovery. PhotoRec will recover all files that it finds to the selected destination directory. This makes it ideal for usb sticks, memory cards and other devices with little storage space.

PhotoRec is available for download at the CGSecurity website.

Testdisk, which is a open source data recovery tool, might be the tool you need when you encounter a situation like the one described above. Testdisk will only help if the errors are software based, if you encounter a problem that is hardware based you are out of luck. Just download the version of Testdisk that is offered for your operating system and execute it. If you can’t boot the system you might want to use the gparted linux distribution instead which includes testdisk and can be booted from CD. (recommended)

Please note that you need to know what you are doing, you should have at least basic knowledge about partitions, file systems and the like to proceed using a tool like testdisk. You might erase data on other partitions otherwise. After selecting wether you would like to create a new log, append to an existing log or use no log you have to choose one of the hard drives that is currently connected to your computer.

You might want to disconnect other hard drives from your computer to avoid mistakes that could erase the data on that drives. Select a partition type afterwards, Intel/PC, Apple, None, Sun and Xbox.

After that you have many options – all of them are explained in great detail in the testdisk wiki. You may analyse the partition which displays partitions and searches for lost ones, write a test MBR, change the disk geometry, erase all data and access advanced filesystem utilities for Fat, NTFS and EXT2/EXT3 which leads to options to repair the partitions.