OK, my hard drive bit the dust and my back up bit it too. Anyway, I've been trying out various linux hard drive recovery software and none seem to work. I have a really great program that will recover NTFS partition no matter what, well, unless it died in a chainsaw massacre. I'm not convinced that Windows programmers can come up with something better than Linux programmers. I've tried testdisk, but it sucks something hard. You spend 5+ hours waiting for it to scan the drive and it shows a bunch of partitions, but then when you go to check the partitions it has this gawd awful ui where you press 'q' to go back to the previous screen *sometimes* and 'q' to exit the program *sometimes*. Needless to say when you inadvertently press 'q' at the wrong time (it's not even clear when that is exactly) you have to spend 5+ hours waiting for it to re-scan the drive. So, testdisk is useless thanks to its stupid interface. I've tried numerous programs for windows, but they don't seem to find anything.

So, does anyone know a Linux hard drive recovery application?

Any (good) recovery software inspects all sectors on your disk, so it must last. I am afraid you will find nothing better than testdisk...

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Well, I mean, testdisk seems good, but it just has this awful interface. I don't get why it can't use left/right arrow keys or some other keys to shift between partitions? It has to use the same key it uses to quit to menu? That's just stupidity.

So you're all bitter and twisted because your hardware died and some-one wrote recovery software that doesn't work the way you want ?.
An attitude like that ain't going to win you a lot of sympathy.

I have to agree though that people in your situation are likely to be "frantic" and a sane (obvious ?) UI would make sense. Certainly "principle of least surprise" should apply. On the other hand, I've never felt baboozled by testdisk - but I've always used it when I've been in control/testing.
5 hours sounds like it was retrying reads - as in a (really) broken disk. I've never had it take anywhere near that long - how big was the disk ?.
How come your backup also failed ?. Surely to Christ you didn't have you backup on the same disk ?.

It's not that it doesn't work the way I want. It's like I said, there's a list of partitions after it scans. You press 'p' to check out the partition, and then 'q' to go back to the list of the partitions ... *sometimes*. *Sometimes* the 'q' button takes you back to the main menu, forcing you to do the 5+ hour scan again. This makes the program useless to me.

I have to use the deep scan because there is no file system. Testdisk has to search for files, not file systems. That's why there's a 5+ hour scan. The physical hardware is fine.

I don't know why my back ups failed me at the same time, Murphy's Law or something, I guess. Next time my back ups are going to be in NTFS.

I have noticed that those who complain loudly about Free software rarely write software, or consider where 'normal' actually came from. I have lost data and backups myself and was sore. I have found testdisk a bit incorrigible, and goofed accidentally using it.

Probably like you, my first experience of a ui was m$ windoze, complete with erratic behaviour, reinstalls, malware and viruses. It has a way of presenting stuff that I learned to use and called it 'learning the computer'. It wasn't - it was learning windoze.

Now unix predates Windoze by at least 15 years. Unix was written by geeks for geeks, and the effort of coding a ui has to take into account every general type of WM from bloated to spartan, and using continually changing widget sets. It's what they wanted to make for the rest of us. You would be welcome if you offered to write or update a gtk2 interface for any of these geeky packages so they would look prettier. If you think testdisk is bad, try using something with the Athena widget set, which seriously redefines mouse usage-Xfig, for instance.

That's an option - you'll be able to save the data, but lose permissions.
I prefer something that verifies the data - perhaps have a look at fsarchiver.

I thought I'd pop in this thread to let hedron know I feel his pain. He's right--powerful as the software may be, its like navigating a Commodore 64 text adventure game, and if you open the wrong door... you're dead.

There are at least two options (that I encountered) on the partition recovery interface where when you attempt to use it, you recieve a friendly message like "there are currently no partitions selected for writing to disk" and the only option is to go back to the main menu. The first time you hit it by accident, you'll be pissed. Four hours later when you hit it again, you'll throw your machine out the f*cking window.

Hats off to the folks for putting together a tool that (apparently) works well, but a bad interface is a bad interface.