So my dad tends to have a lot of really dumb computer problems that are either caused by him or some random virus/malware that he somehow manages to get on his system. And of course, I get to be ‘Mr. Helpdesk’ and help him fix them (sometimes), even though I’m 900 miles always from him.

His latest dumb computer trick involved some weird bug where he created a partition while Windows was running, formatted it, *moved* (not copied, but *moved*) a bunch of data to it, and then managed to get a blue screen without rebooting the system. For whatever reason, Windows decided that it didn’t want to write the partition or boot sectors for the hard drive correctly, and so he temporarily lost his data. In the past when I’ve had these kinds of problems with partition layouts, I’ve done things like manually recreating the MBR (a very long time ago) or using something like linux’s fdisk to set the parameters manually. However, the ‘easy’ tricks didn’t work for his problem this time, but I found this marvelous software that seems to do the trick:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

So hopefully it’s useful for you too!