Partition Recovery

The Context
I use an external 320GB WD Hard Drive as backup disk for Mac and XP files. Therefore it has three partitions: one partition to backup XP files, one partition to backup Mac files, and a last partition as common repository. This last one is a FAT32 partition with ebooks, music and movies that I want accessible from XP and Mac.

The Problem
This morning the common partition could not be mounted on Mac, Disk Utility was not even able to verify it. I tried on XP and I received a "Drive is not formatted message. Do you want to format it?". The other two partitions had no problem.

The Alternatives
I Google'd for 'partition recovery' software and I found a lot of alternatives, most of them commercial software with a free demo. I downloaded some of them to see if my data can be receovered. 'Partition Table Doctor' and 'PartRecovery' were able to see my files in the damaged partition, but before paying for the solution I searched for other alternatives. 'Find And Mount' is an interesting software it builds on the fly a partition that can be mounted on a different drive letter, it was able to mount my data, but since it is 'on the fly', the performance makes it unusable.

The Solution
Then I found TestDisk, it is a freeware tool available for different platforms, and in no time it was able to rebuild the boot sector and FAT partitions. Now everything is working fine. I strongly recommend this program and, if you also find it useful, consider donating something in their webpage.