Running Testdisk on Ubuntu

I have a corrupted HD and it seems the best software to fix this is testdisk. However, seeing that I couldn't get it to work under Vista or XP, I've decided to give Ubuntu a try. I booted into the live CD and downloaded the program. However, I can't seem to get it working.

That seems to be the instructions page, but I can't understand a thing it says. Although I'm relatively comfortable with Windows, I'm utterly ignorant about linux distros, so please explain this to me in a step-by-step manner. Thanks in advance for your help

 

I'm not sure, but it looks like you've dumped the contents of a shell script or something. Have you looked at the Testdisk webpage where it says the following;

You should only have to execute the testdisk program as root, as in the example above.

BTW, I would recommend booting a specific recovery CD with testdisk on it. They list some examples on their website here. Find one you like, download it and burn it to CD on someone else's computer, and then reboot your computer with that CD, to run the recovery program. You don't risk further corruption on your drive, and it's usually a boot CD that's menu driven, so you don't have to worry about manually running commands, etc.

FWIW the best recovery program I've ever used, is Spinrite, although if Testdisk were around back when I needed it, I would have certainly used that as my first try. Then if that didn't work I would buy Spinrite and try with that.

Good Luck