I have a lot of my personal data (photos, music, etc.) stored on a RAID1 array (two drives that mirror each other so that if one drive dies the other has all of the data). Having my data on a RAID array gave me a lot of confidence that the data was secure…until it died last week. The RAID controller bit the dust, one of the two drives died, and the partition table of the other drive was corrupted. I couldn’t access the data using any windows utilities or fdisk, gdisk, gparted or ddrescue. I realized I hadn’t backed that storage up in more than a year.

It was starting to look grim, when I read about testdisk and gave it a try…and it worked like a champ. testdisk recognized the damaged partition and and gave me access to the NTFS file system. I was able to copy the data onto a good drive so all is good (and I’m going to be a lot better about backups). Thanks testdisk!