Analyse

Analyzes a drive's current partition structure and searches partition making it possible to recover lost partitions.

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TestDisk assumes the existence of partitions and scans all relevant drive cylinders for them. A primary partition starts at the beginning of a cylinder (head=0, sector=1), while a logical partition starts a little further along (head=1, sector=1). For each possible partition starting location, TestDisk can search for the presence of a filesystem header (FAT or NTFS boot sector, EXT2/EXT3 superblock, BSD disklabel...), which confirms the presence of a known partition type. Thus, the size of a partition is determined directly from its structure on the disk. Each partition that TestDisk discovers is added to a list of found partitions.

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Once the analysis is complete, TestDisk generates a report of found partitions.

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You can list files of FAT/EXT2/EXT3/RFS partition by pressing P (FAT directory listing is limited to 5 clusters, some files may not appears).

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You can also change the partition type with T or add another partition with A. With the left/right arrow key, you can change the status of the selected partition between Primary, * bootable, Logical, Deleted. Structure: Ok should appear if everything is ok, i.e. no primary partition between two extended, one or less bootable partition, no partition using the same disk space.

TestDisk gives the user a choice of writing that data to the drive's Partition Table, or of running a more detailed analysis

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Anyway TestDisk ask you to confirm the Write operation.

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Back to Running the TestDisk Program