Hetman Partition Recovery

One of the many expressions which can describe a very bad day is "lost partition". Erasing a few files by mistake is not that serious, but if an entire partition is damaged, you would have a good reason to panic. Fortunately, there are many data recovery utilities available and Hetman Partition Recovery is one that you will find very useful. Of course, it can recover individual files, but, like its name suggests, it is designed to identify damaged, corrupted or formatted partitions and fix, restore or unformat them.

The utility's setup package is roughly 5 and a half Mb large. Besides selecting a destination path and placing shortcuts, you can also tick an option for using the program to open disk images in .dsk format. It works with FAT file systems as well as NTFS and it will recover data from local or removable drives.

Like other programs, from the same suite, Hetman Partition Recovery features an explorer-like interface. You can use it to navigate through your folders, but you will have to perform a scan before accessing a partition. The software can perform a fast scan or a full analysis in order to recover deleted data from local partitions or removable memory devices. If you want to restore recently erased data, a fast scan will be sufficient. The full analysis includes a content aware scan and it covers NTFS and FAT partitions, which are used by older Windows versions, USB drives, digital cameras and so on.

When the scanning process is complete, you can explore the contents of a partition as usual. Among your files and folders, you will find the software's own folders, which contain lost and found data. If you choose a full scan before accessing the partition, you can still perform a content aware analysis by accessing the folder with the same name. A new window will pop up, where you can target all data or individual file types, like archives, audio, video or image files and others.

During the new scan, the Content Aware Analysis folder will be populated with sub-folders which contain certain file types, like JPEG or PNG images, MS Office documents and so on. You can stop the scan at any time if you find the files you are looking for. Some of them can be previewed when selected and you can recover them by clicking the Recovery button, located on the interface's toolbar. This will bring up a window with options for saving the found data to a different location on your hard drive, burning it on a CD or DVD, creating an ISO image or uploading it to a FTP server.

The software can recover entire partitions as well. Besides the explorer-like tree menu, on the left side of the interface, you will find a second one, that contains physical disks. Just access your hard drive and perform a full analysis and the program will find your formatted or damaged partitions. Once they are found, you will be able to restore any contained data. Hetman Partition Recovery is also capable of saving partitions as .dsk images and mounting them. When creating an image, you will have the options of compressing the contents and saving the whole partition or part of it.