If your hard drive crashes … you may use foremost to retrieve your documents, photographs and so on.

Foremost is a linux tool for conducting forensic examinations. Although intended for law enforcement purposes, it may be useful to other members of the community. Foremost reads through a file, such as a dd image file or a disk partition and extracts files.

Foremost is available for most *nix platforms and Windoze via CygWin. Foremost is useful when you can’t mount a ddrescue image.

Execute the following command:

foremost -t all -i my_crashed_harddrive.dd

… and all your documents should hopefully be rescued 🙂