Losing a disk partition can really make your day. It can happen in lots of ways, including viruses, bad software, and operator error. EaseUs Partition Recovery is a free tool that can recover and restore lost or damaged partitions in many cases. It can recover partitions on most hard disks, including IDE, ATA, SATA, and SCSI drives and FAT, NTFS, and EXT formats, for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows. It recovers MBR and GPT partitions, too.

EaseUs Partition Recovery’s wizard-based interface serves the dual purpose of making the tool very easy to use and of reducing the chance of making a mistake. Any time you’re messing about with disk partitions, especially trying to recover lost or damaged partitions, there’s always the potential to do more harm than good. But the wizard and a Web-based Help file provide some reassurance, even for inexperienced users. Recovering lost or damaged disk partitions isn’t exactly the same as running an update, though, and it helps to have a basic grasp of what’s involved before you run EaseUs Partition Recovery. For example, first make sure that the partition can’t be recovered by ordinary means, such as unhiding it. A system backup is a good idea, too (always).

As luck would have it, we didn’t have a partition to recover, so to test Partition Recovery, we deleted our MBR and…no. Obviously, we didn’t inflict harm just to see if some freeware could fix it, which violates any number of Rule Number Ones. We’ve recovered our share of partitions, though, and the wizard-based process EaseUs Partition Recovery outlines makes it difficult to mess up. Of course, EaseUs Partition Recovery can’t recover the partition it’s installed on (how would it run?) or your MBR or GPT; you’ll have to install the disk on another system running Partition Recovery, which is still probably easier and cheaper than buying a new computer. But if you lose your D drive partition, for instance, try EaseUs Partition Recovery. Of course, it’s not a guarantee, and your partition might be unrecoverable. But you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying