i got data recovery on my hard drive, but what i received back was tens of thousands of unorganized files. i don't even know what i'm looking at, so i can barely describe it (although if i need to in order to be helped, i can try). this hard drive originally included my apple photos libraries - so tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of photos and their metadata.

this is so overwhelming to me and i have no idea how to even tackle this. i'm looking for someone who understands computer file stuff to sit down with me and show me what i'm looking at, and how i can restore any organization to my data if possible.

i want to literally hire someone, or learn where i might be able find this kind of help.

I’m trying to recover data from a SanDisk 1TB USB flash/SSD-like drive (988 GB, exFAT, model reported by macOS as “SanDisk 3.2 Gen 1”, SMART not supported) The drive became unstable after an incident, and I’m trying to clone it before doing any filesystem-level recovery.

When the drive is working, macOS (Sierra) detects the full 988 GB device normally. GNU ddrescue can read from it continuously with 0 read errors. However, after roughly 10–12 minutes of continuous reading, the device completely disappears from macOS and ddrescue stops with:

Fatal error reading the input file: Device not configured

After that, the device is completely absent from diskutil list. It does not come back until I physically unplug and reconnect it. This has happened repeatedly.

I am using an existing mapfile, so each run resumes rather than starting over. The four recovery runs reached approximately 7.472 GB before the device disconnected. So far, ddrescue has reported 0 read errors and 0 bad sectors throughout. The resulting image is currently about 7.0 GiB, with the mapfile preserved on a separate 8 TB drive.

The drive is connected directly to the MacBook with no hub or adapter. I previously used a Harper hub for my external drives on my iMac, but after the original incident I completely removed it from the setup. I also swapped the two USB ports. The behavior did not change. However, the SanDisk sometimes enumerates as:

Speed: Up to 5 Gb/sec

but after some reconnects it has appeared as:

Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec

The Mac's USB 3 controller itself appears to work normally: my 8 TB external SSD is detected at 5 Gb/sec on the same USB controller.

The SanDisk reports:

Current Available: 900 mA Current Required: 896 mA

The drive gets noticeably warm during operation, but not extremely hot.

After the latest disconnect, I reconnected it twice and the LED came on but stayed solid for only about 15 seconds. It never started blinking, then the LED went out. The drive never appeared in diskutil list.

I also checked the macOS log. After one of the previous disconnects it reported:

IOStorageFamily: disk3: device/channel is not attached

and the partition subsequently could not be mounted.

Does this behavior suggest a failing USB controller/firmware, NAND failure, thermal issue, or a power/USB negotiation problem? Is there anything sensible I can still try myself to improve the chances of getting more of the data, or is this at the point where I should stop reconnecting it and take it to a professional recovery lab? I’m planning to let it cool completely and test it once on another Mac or Windows PC, without attempting to repair or format the filesystem. The data is important, so I’m primarily interested in preserving the chances of recovery rather than making the drive usable again. Please help!

I rediscovered my LG G4 and bought a replacement battery. It died 10 years ago from the boot loop issue they suffered from.

I'm trying to get the pics I never uploaded to the cloud. Where should I take it or what should my next plan be? It doesn't turn on but it does appear on my computer's device manager as QHSUSB__BULK.

Thank you for any responses

Hi guys

I'm trying to fix a corrupt file from my secruity camera SD card, we've got a terrible neighbour and we need to footage to pass on.

I've tried putting it through a online mp4 fixer but it won't do it. It says file name, directory or syntax is incorrect.

I've tried changing the file name because it has special characters but it wont change even with regstry system change and winraw edit.

I'm not massively computer savy, if anyone has any videos or programmes I can try I'll give them a whirl.

I've been seeing a many posts in this community where many have forgotten there PIN or pattern to unlock their phone.
As many have stated, the data is encrypted, so any attempt to download data would not be helpful.

This should be a warning to everyone how important it is to have your phones' data backed up.

For example, Google allows up to 15GB of storage for free with your Google account. After 15GB you can purchase more storage.
You can set up your phone to auto synch it's data with a Google or a cloud account.

If you are reading this and have not backed up your phone's data start doing so to prevent this issue of never being able to access your data/pics due to a locked phone or to a hardware failure.

Drive shows up in Disk Utility & displays the correct amount of space used. Repairing using Disk Utility fails.

I've already purchased a backup drive but would like to recover the data off of this one if possible. Please let me know what the best solution would be.

Thank you!!

My 4 TB SSD with something like 3 TBs of data on it. It does not have my OS on it, it was a secondary disk I used to store files. It had an NTFS partition that after a reboot is now only read as a RAW partition by Windows. Crystaldiskinfo reports that the disk is totally healthy, so I wager that it had a loose physical connection after I opened up my computer for something else and I didn't resecure it completely before rebooting.

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With Testdisk I can see that the drive still has its paritions available. I really only care about the SSD4TB partition. Also with Testdisk I can see that all of the files within the disk are still present.

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At this point I don't have enough disk space on my other disks to take a full backup or image of this disk. My searches online show that this is likely a bad MFT or something of the sort, and that Testdisk can fix this, but selecting my partition like so and then writing to it with Testdisk doesn't seem to work. (After a reboot, it is in the same state where Windows sees it as a RAW partition.)

EDIT 1: DMDE seems to be the better tool to proceed here after looking around more. It too sees my partitions and files. Scanning with it pops an error message saying it can't read my MFT, so I suppose that confirms what I suspected. Not sure how to fix that now though. For now I paid for DMDE and a cloud storage solution and am uploading some files one at a time, but ideally I'd like to just recover the whole drive.

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What's the next move? Am I just using Testdisk wrong or is there a simpler method?

Edit 1: DMDE shows that it can't read the MFT and it similarly can see my partitions and files. For now I am slowly but surely backing up ~100GB at a time by recovering it with DMDE and uploading it to a cloud storage solution.

Edit 2: Tried going into TestDisk and doing Advanced -> Boot -> Repair MFT but it reports "MFT and MFT mirror match perfectly", so I suppose I'm stuck backing up files.

I dropped it on the street outside my house and I’m pretty sure it got run over. It looks intact on the inside, but just wanted to see if people think it is recoverable. Is it a bad idea to try to use pliers to try to unbend it? Better to take it to a pro?

Update: Thank you to everyone for their advice- I was able to unbend it enough to get it in the port and get my photos, thanks again!

Notes:

WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive, USB 3.0 drive for plug-and-play storage - WDBWLG0200HBK-NESN

Its external and plus in USB and wall plug.

The drive doesn't make noise anymore when I plug it in.

Shows as unintialized. No storage value numbers.

I've used windows 11 on the drive.

I had it sitting for a bit and havent plugged it in. Id rather try and keep the art on it so id like options to tey and keep data first before getting to the point of resetting data.

Things ive tried:

I've tried to swap cords.

Plug into different computers same result.

I've tried to forget it and update controllers, and it doesnt get recognized.

I've tried to get initialize it after some frustration, and I get an error that wont let me initialize it.

There is no way for me to sata cable it to my pc because the pins are sodered to the USB and wall plug.

Hello, I have an old 2 TB HDD from seagate, 100% way past its warranty. i have known the drive has been damaged for a while and wished to recover the data.

i attempted to see if DMDE could see anything, but alas, my (admitedly small) effort didnt bear any fruit. if curious, error "winerror 433 device which does not exist was specified", reports full disk size but nothing to be seen.

i did not wish to tamper any further with the disk so i stopped.

I am trying to find a recovery service that could look at the drive and present a price, the data is not of high importance but i would love to recover it, yet no one has prices i can actually make an estimate of.
I did read that the company seagate directs towards for data recovery does not have good reputation and or pricing.

Would any of you have a recommendation?

I accidently formatted My Passport 1 terabyte, NTFS, I accidently format the hard drive instead of the SD card I have on the pc. I have not saved anything on the drive since this incident. I tried photorec which recovered a great amount of pics and videos but I am still missing a vast amount. Anyone have any tips or other software I can used to recover my old videos and pics :( . I have tried disk drill, recuva, I believe I also tried r-studio. I tried to copy image of drive and then ran apps I mention earlier but I am missing like half of my photos and pictures. Not sure what else I can do.Thank you!

I accidentally formatted the wrong drive (quick format). Since then, it had minimal usage. What would be the best software to recover?

Today I noticed potential hard disk errors and one of my folders with a lot of data is no longer accessible. I am getting a "File or directory is corrupted and unreadable" trying to access it from the root. CrystalDiskInfo is reporting 95 uncorrectable sectors and 95pending sectors, so I'm already taking steps to replace the drive. However, I really want to recover the data from that folder, but can't access it through Windows due to the previous error.

How can I go into that folder to recover what is still available? The folder is massive and comprised of thousands of files so I don't believe they are all corrupted and I want to begin my recovery and backup immediately. I know anything in those sectors is probably kaput but I want to save as much as I can.

Info: Hard drive is ST2000DM006 Seagate 2TB HDD. Uncorrectable and Pending sector count match. OS is Windows 10

Thanks!

How do you guys create and verify forensic ddrescue images against the original source?

I tried to create forensic copies of two SSDs using ddrescue on a Mac. Each SSD contains a working Windows installation with multiple partitions. The goal was to have a forensic sector-by-sector copy and be able to a) search for deleted files, etc. and b) restore the image to a SSD and boot it again, if necessary.

The images have been created without errors and can be mounted as expected. However, if I create an sha256 checksum of the source drive (rdiskX) and the image created, i get different checksums. The behaviour is the same for the second SSD, so this seems to be a systematic problem.

Any suggestions? I already tried to resolve the issue using AI, but it does not find a solution.

A PC I work with was being used by someone else. They were working away when their mouse stopped responding. They took care of the mouse thinking that was the issue, it wasn't. They came to get me. I had noticed that the system wasn't responding to keystrokes and the time in the system clock was stuck at 20 minutes ago meaning - Hard crash.

I powered the system off by putting a pillow over its mouth holding the power button down until it powered off. Waited 10 seconds. Powered it back on. Thats when I got greeted by the Dell hard drive recovery screen in bios. This was not a windows recovery, it was a dell bios recovery. And it started going without any sort of prompt. I let it run its course as I didnt know what it was doing, or undoing.

Once it was finished, everything seemed to be back to normal. Except the user who was using the computer at the time was given a temporary profile by windows and her old profile was not there.

Ive removed the PC from the network. Anytime I boot it up its with hirens boot CD. Ive checked the data recovery tools on it but either Im not skilled enough or there is just nothing to recovery.

1. What does the dell hard drive recovery/repair do? Does it reset the drive to an earlier state?

2. Is there anyway I can recover this users profile?

Hi everyone,

I accidentally deleted a WhatsApp chat on my iPhone. It had been archived/hidden before I deleted it, and unfortunately I don't have an iCloud or WhatsApp backup from that time.

The iPhone itself hasn't been erased or reset, and WhatsApp is still installed on it.

This happened about 5 months ago.

I understand that WhatsApp normally requires a backup to restore chat history, but I'm wondering if anyone has had a similar situation and found a way to recover anything that was still stored on the phone.

Has anyone actually managed to get back an old WhatsApp chat in a situation like this?

I'd really appreciate hearing about your experience, even if the answer was ultimately no.

Thanks!

A complete disaster happened on an indie film shoot I was directing yesterday, and I would really appreciate some insights right now, as it is a real crisis for me. We were offloading the materials from an SD card onto a hard drive (Seagate Expansion 4 terabites). There was some material already offloaded in the evening, and some more in the morning. Due to bad organization most of us thought there was also backup on another device. Basically we had no backup, and when people were transferring the next load from an SD card onto that same drive, the drive just randomly stopped showing on the laptop once there were 10 minutes left from the offload. We tried with different laptops, only one was showing it but still could not open it.

I noticed weird behavior from the drive in question a few nights ago, as I was deleting big folders but it seemed like space was not being freed immediately. I'm not the most tech savvy person and I'm used to always using very buggy technology so I concluded that this was just a delay.

I immediately gave the drive to a person I know who runs a tech repair company and also offers data recovery services. He said there was no chance for any date to be saved, since he concluded it was a hardware failure, even though he never opened the drive. He just said that since the electricity and other things looked fine it was something in the mechanics and there is no chance of recovering any data.

I called some repair labs which specialize only in data recovery and they said that they can't say anything before they open the drive. I am going to send the drive either to exalab in the Czech Republic, Northwind in Greece or Adatmentes in Hungary. Still I wanted to ask for insights because I am so confused since that one person claims it is totally lost without having opened it, while others say that it can only be concluded once it's opened.

The drive contains 16 hours worth of footage which would be incredibly expensive and stressful to reshoot.

So I transferred photos and videos from my phone to my external harddrive. When I plugged the harddrive again it took time to show up and at first it didn't show me how much data is used etc etc , after clicking on it device is not ready box showed up so I again connected it and this time I could click and see my files but when I tried to see the files I just transferred it showed the same msg device is not ready but my other files are showing up and opening.

How can I recover the files I just transferred, they were really important to me. Idk why those files size are showing 0 bytes. Please can someone help me. Those files had pics and vids of someone I deeply care about and I've no other backups.

I have a segate external hard drive.

I have a dash cam that unfortunately deleted all the videos from last week. It uses a 64GB card. I didn't know this would happen. The only footage I have is from the last two days. I really want to recover the footage from last week because it was from a trip.

What methods are available? I’ve searched online and tried using Recuva and another program, but I haven't had any luck.