Keep your hard drive in tip-top shape with Eassos PartitionGuru Free
Most free recovery tools focus on undeleting files only. As its name suggests, though, Eassos PartitionGuru Free goes a little further: the program can recover anything from individual files to entire partitions, and it has a few other useful features thrown in, too.
That’s the theory, at least. In practice the free edition of the program is a little restricted, and can’t recover data on USB keys, GPT disks, or regular drives which don’t use 512-byte sectors. If that’s not going to affect you, though, PartitionGuru does otherwise have some interesting functionality which you might find very useful.
The program opens with a straightforward text-based interface showing your drives on the left, and details on the currently selected partition on the right. This isn’t as attractive as the graphical approach taken by most partition managers, but it gets the job done. And if you would like a graphical view of how the files are distributed on the current partition, just click “Analyze” for a quick look.
If you’ve accidentally deleted a few files (or a partition) then clicking File Recovery will begin the process of trying to bring them back. Choose the “File” option and the program will scan your selected partition, looking for remnants of lost documents, and if your files are found then you can restore them in a couple of clicks. The program didn’t find everything in our tests, though, and the inability to preview files in the free version is also an issue.
Partition recovery seemed more reliable in our experience, though, if a little slow. Once we’d chosen the relevant option the program crawled over our hard drive, correctly locating and restoring our test partitions. It was all very straightforward.
PartitionGuru also provides some useful backup options. It’s able to copy files, clone individual partitions or entire drives, for instance. And there’s an option to back up and restore your partition table, very useful should disaster strike.
There’s a partition manager thrown in, too. It’s all fairly basic -- no fancy wizards to help you redistribute free space from one partition to another – but the program can create, format, hide and delete partitions, and there are options to scan them for errors, rebuild the Master Boot Record, convert between primary and logical types, and more.
And if you can’t do this within Windows for whatever reason, then there’s even an option which will reboot you to a DOS version. This made us a little nervous as immediately before restarting, the program displays a warning on what to do if your PC stops booting entirely (use the “rebuild MBR” command), but we carried on anyway, and everything worked just fine. Still, this may not be something to try if you’re not entirely sure what the MBR is, and how to fix it.
PartitionGuru Free has plenty of restrictions, then, and the file undelete option is unimpressive. Partition recovery worked better for us, though, and with plenty of bonus functions on offer the program could well appeal to the more technical PC user.
a Photo Credit: Balandina G/Shutterstock