Thankfully there’s a great wiki and documentation of how to go about the business of data recovery. It searches for following files and is able to undelete them: * Sun/NeXT audio data (.au) * RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav) * BMP bitmap (.bmp) * bzip2 compressed data (.bz2) * Source code written in C (.c) * Canon Raw picture (.crw) * Canon catalog (.ctg) * FAT subdirectory * Microsoft Office Document (.doc) * Nikon dsc (.dsc) * HTML page (.html) * JPEG picture (.jpg) * MOV video (.mov) * MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3) * Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg) * Minolta Raw picture (.mrw) * Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf) * Portable Document Format (.pdf) * Perl script (.pl) * Portable Network Graphics (.png) * Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf) * Contax picture (.raw) * Rollei picture (.rdc) * Rich Text Format (.rtf) * Shell script (.sh) * Tar archive (.tar ) * Tag Image File Format (.tiff) * Microsoft ASF (.wma) * Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f) * zip archive (.The process itself is rather exciting (if you want the data back) and may require a fresh pair of pants upfront, throughout and after. It has been extended to search also for non audio/video headers.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks. It works with : * DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 * NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP ) * Linux Ext2 and Ext3 * BeFS ( BeOS ) * BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD ) * CramFS (Compressed File System) * HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System * JFS, IBM's Journaled File System * Linux Raid * Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2) * LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager * Netware NSS * ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6 * Sun Solaris i386 disklabel * UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/.) * XFS, SGI's Journaled File System

It is very useful in forensics, recovering lost partitions. TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks.

Testdisk recover deleted partition