A couple of years ago I shut down my computer when my wife and I went on vacation. When we got back I booted up and…nothing. My bios posted, then all I got was

NTLDR is missing

My partition was lost, and I was not happy. Neither was she. Not all of our photos were there, because we hadn’t made the full switch to digital, but everything she had taken through college on her digital camera, and a lot of pictures from our honey moon and first year-plus of marriage were there. Since I built the computer myself (out of tin foil and ornaments), the blame fell on me, as well as the burden for getting it fixed.

I shopped that drive around for a year trying to find someone to recover it. Everywhere I went the answer was the same: $150 – $200, and all they could do was run the software on it and hope for the best. For me that meant that even if they recovered the files, my best case scenario saw my checking account -$149. Not a good plan.

So I spent my nights searching online for a tool, any tool, that would help. At this point I can’t remember what I tried, but nothing worked. I had created a new partition for XP in the empty space on the drive, but I was running out of room and started feeling pressure to just wipe it and start over.

I made one last effort and found TestDisk. It didn’t seem like much, but I started it up and went to the movies. When I got home I was amazed;it had found all of my info, and was just waiting for the okay to restore it all. A couple of hours later I had all my data—which I immediately backed up—and I had my drive back. And my wife suddenly forgot that I (may have) had anything to do with the crash, and only remembered that I had fixed it.

I’m spreading the word now because a few months ago my in-laws had a hard drive crash. My wife and I knew nothing about it when we got to their house for our visit, and I wish I could have shared this with them.

They had made the full move to digital and had years of pictures on their drive. It got corrupted, and when they took it to GeekSquad, they were told that it was lost. GS wiped the drive, restored the Gateway settings, and sent them home. They were out a few hundred bucks, and had lost all but what was left on the spare memory cards in the camera bag.

I don’t know if TestDisk works better than the GS software, but don’t let someone, no matter how much you trust them, clear your hard drive until you’ve looked at it yourself. First, if your IT guy can format the drive and restore your OS, and you can go on as before, then your data should have been recoverable. If the drive is so damaged that the lost partition can’t be recovered, you probably wouldn’t be able to use it anymore (this is not my area of expertise, though). Second, drives are so cheap, about 10-15 cents a GB for SATA II, that you should just buy a new one and hold on to the old one until you find some way to recover it. Don’t give up on your memories.

So TestDisk saved my marriage, and it might save yours.