Top tools for hard drive data recovery, information & management, diagnosis, cloning, Low-Level editing, wiping, installation, partition management, firmware repair and more! Softwares used on hard disk drives to achieve various tasks including backups, defragmentation and filesystem checks/error checking.
Bootable Tools
Tools for creating bootable Live CD/DVD and Live USB Drive, useful for repairing unbootable computer systems and retrieving data after a system crash.
- BartPE: A lightweight variant of Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 32 bit operating systems, similar to a Windows Preinstallation Environment, which can be run from a Live CD or Live USB drive. Discontinued.;
- Finnix: A Debian-based LiveCD with a focus on being small and fast, useful for computer and data rescue;
- Data Rescue 4: A bootable Mac OS X recovery DVD by Prosoft Engineering company, supports HFS and HFS+ file systems;
- Data Rescue PC4: A Linux-based Live CD/Live USB with file recovery software by Prosoft Engineering company, supports FAT and NTFS file systems;
- Disk Drill Basic: capable of creating bootable Mac OS X USB drives for data recovery;
- Hiren’s BootCD: A boot CD containing various diagnostic programs such as partitioning agents, system performance benchmarks, disk cloning and imaging tools, data recovery tools, MBR tools, BIOS tools, and many others for fixing various computer problems;
- Knoppix: The original Linux Live CD. It contains many useful utilities for data recovery.;
- SpinRite: A FreeDOS-based data recovery tool for hard disks and magnetic storage devices;
- SystemRescueCD: A Gentoo based Live CD, useful for repairing unbootable computer systems and retrieving data after a system crash;
- Trinity Rescue Kit: A free command-line Live CD Linux distribution created especially for rescuing Windows PCs;
- Windows Preinstallation Environment (WinPE): A customizable Microsoft Windows Boot DVD (made by Microsoft and distributed for free). Can be modified to boot to any of the programs listed.;
Disk Cloning Softwares
Softwares that can copy the contents of one disk into another disk or into a disk image.
- Acronis True Image;
- Apple Software Restore;
- Clonezilla;
- dcfldd;
- dd (Unix);
- Disk Utility;
- FSArchiver;
- Ghost;
- GParted Live CD;
- HDClone;
- Image for Windows;
- IsoBuster;
- Kleo Bare Metal Backup;
- Mondo Rescue;
- ntfsclone;
- partimage;
- Partition-Saving;
- Redo Backup and Recovery;
Disk Partitioning Softwares
Softwares for performing disk partitioning.
- Disk Utility;
- GNOME Disks;
- diskpart;
- fdisk (FreeDOS);
- fdisk (Microsoft);
- fdisk (OS/2);
- fdisk (Unix-like);
- FIPS;
- GNU Parted CLI-only (GUIs: Gparted, QtParted);
- GParted (GUI for GNU Parted);
- KDE Partition Manager;
- Logical Disk Manager;
- ntfsresize;
- Parted Magic;
- PartitionMagic;
- Partition Manager;
- QtParted (GUI for GNU Parted);
- Ranish Partition Manager;
- Solaris format utility;
Disk Checkers
Programs which can scan a hard disk to find files or areas that are corrupted in some way, or were not correctly saved, and eliminate them for a more efficiently operating hard drive.
- CHKDSK
- fsck
Disk Layout Tools
Disk formatting and disk partitioning tools are responsible for generating low level disk layouts and file systems.
- Logical Disk Manager (Windows)
- format (Windows)
- fdisk (Windows)
- diskpart (Windows)
- Disk Utility (Mac OS)
- Logical Volume Manager (Linux)
- GNOME Disks (also known as Disks or gnome-disk-utility or palimpsest) (Linux)
- GNU Parted (Linux)