Plenty of utilities can recover deleted files, but what if you can't boot your computer, or the whole drive has been formatted? Here's how to dig deep and recover the most elusive deleted files, or even whole partitions.

We've shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren't going to cut it. In this article, we'll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely.

Note: These tools cannot recover data that has been overwritten on a hard disk. Whether a deleted file has been overwritten depends on many factors – the quicker you realize that you want to recover a file, the more likely you will be able to do so.

http://lifehacker.com/5525534/recover-data-like-a-forensics-expert-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd

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