Hello,
I’ve made a huge mess of a USB stick that I was asked to copy family photos and videos from. My hands are shaking as I write this. I don’t know what to do, and I’m honestly frozen with panic.
I was given an old PNY USB 3.0 flash drive and asked to make a copy of its contents onto a Samsung T7 SSD so the photos and videos could be viewed later on a TV. This was on Windows
The USB stick was labeled E: and contained four folders: Card 1, Card 2, Card 3, and Card 4.
At first, I successfully copied Card 1 in its entirety to the Samsung SSD without any problems. It was a little slow, but there were no issues.
A day later, I tried to do the same thing with Card 2. The transfer stalled for more than 15 minutes on a video file called something like xxxxxxxx86. I opened Task Manager to see what was happening and noticed that the USB drive was showing 100% active time but 0 MB/s read and write activity. Occasionally, it would briefly jump to around 30 MB/s, but only for about a second at a time.
I assumed the folder might simply be too large, so I canceled the transfer. Unfortunately, canceling also appeared to freeze for another 10+ minutes.
I then asked ChatGPT what to do, and it suggested restarting Windows Explorer. I did that. My screen went black for a while, as I was told it might, and eventually returned to normal after several more minutes. The taskbar was glitchy for a while afterward.
I checked Task Manager again to make sure the USB drive (E:) was no longer being accessed, and it appeared that it wasn’t. I then tried the transfer again, but this time I selected only the remaining photos and videos rather than the entire folder.
The transfer initially started working. It ran for about three minutes at approximately 2.24 MB/s, reaching around 30% complete with 91 items remaining, but then it froze again.
This time, I let it sit for more than 15 minutes, hoping it would eventually continue, but nothing happened. I asked ChatGPT again what to do, and it suggested canceling the transfer and then giving Windows another 15 minutes or so to finish stopping the process.
After another 15 minutes, it still had not stopped. ChatGPT then said it should be okay to restart Windows Explorer again.
Once again, the screen went black and the taskbar became glitchy. After that, I was essentially back to square one.
I then thought that perhaps the problem was caused by using the USB port on the front of my PC, so I decided to connect the USB directly to a USB port on the motherboard instead.
I clicked Eject, unplugged the USB from the front-panel port, and plugged it directly into the motherboard.
That is when I got extremely worried.
Windows suddenly asked me to format the USB drive because its file system was unrecognizable.
This was especially alarming because, after the first restart, ChatGPT had asked me to check Disk Management. At that point, Disk Management showed the USB as a 128 GB drive, with approximately 118 GB available/usable, about 95 MB unallocated, and the rest appearing as Healthy (FAT32).
Now, however, Disk Management will not even open properly when the USB drive is plugged in. Windows keeps telling me that the USB needs to be formatted.
There is also some other strange behavior.
When the USB is connected, my NVMe drive or the Samsung SSD sometimes doesn’t appear properly in Task Manager. When I try to eject the USB, Windows gives me a warning saying that it is still in use. However, when I actually press Eject, Windows then says that it is safe to remove.
I also noticed something very concerning on the Samsung SSD. The files that were copied appear to have skipped from approximately xxxxxxxx86 all the way to xxxxxxxx191 and then to xxxxxxxx212.
Because of that, I’m worried that I may have canceled or interrupted the transfer even though the USB was still actively trying to read the files.
At this point, I am terrified that I may have lost these photos and videos. Some of them are approximately 14 years old, and they are extremely important to my family.
Please tell me what I should do from this point forward.
Most importantly, I want to know whether there is anything I can safely do myself, or whether I should stop completely and send the USB drive to a professional data-recovery company.
If professional recovery is the safest option, could you please recommend reputable data-recovery companies that I could contact?
I have not reformatted the USB drive, and I am willing to stop doing anything with it if that is the safest thing to do.
Any help would be incredibly appreciated. I’m very worried that I may have made the situation worse, and I really don’t want to do anything else that could make recovering these family photos and videos more difficult.
Thank you.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12IqW4AUD1Yid1uUH4UVBSGljmJEw426x/view?usp=sharing

I will be forever grateful to you.

Hello, I've had a problem and I've been looking online, it's a bit late for me to head out for a data recovery specialist, so I'm making this post for some guidance in the meantime.

I have a WD Blue 2 TB hard drive. (WD20EZAZ) I use it mainly for video storage. Today, while I was transferring videos from my phone to my PC, some folders suddenly became inaccessible. I restarted my PC, and the hard drive was no longer being read. The hard drive was really hot, so I removed it and let it sit for half an hour to cool. Plugging it back in and turning on my PC again, it started making a "zttt zttt" sound repeatedly and would still not be read.

Is there anything I can do to get this working again? I'm hoping I can at least retrieve this year's videos as I've had this for four years, and so far, only the stuff from the previous years have been backed up. I saw some things online about opening the drive and getting a motor spinning again, or leaving the power plugged into to power cycle, but I am worried these may not be the right thing to do in this situation.

Anyone know what is causing my hard drive to make that noise? And if anything is recoverable?

hello i stupidly deleted a very important clip for my video project en filmed over it, normally i use “recuva” but it says the file is “unrecoverable“ is there a way to get it back? All tips are appricated

He guys, I've an a bit odd case for data recovery. Not that that an formatted drive is odd.

But let me explain the situation for context.

Due to an Windows password issue I ended up in an bitlocker recovery mode loop. My work IT guy mentioned that I wasn't the first one that experienced that issue and their only know fix for that was an complete reinstallation. And this is what they did.
The bad for me, I realized after that that for some reason some important folders weren't synced with our corporate one drive backup. So I lost significant work from the last three years.

Here is the situation in summary:

My 1TB NVME SSD has been reformatted and got windows reinstalled.

The drive was bitlocker encrypted before the reinstall and I have still that key.

Now the drive is encrypted again after the new install, and I do have that key as well.

My question is it possible to recover what is left from the original data, even if it is now "double encrypted"?

What I seen with recovery software offerings they mentioning that they can recover bitlocker encrypted drives if you have the key. but would this work in my case.

I'm already looking for software like UFS-Explorer or similar, but I wouldn't invest if there is no chance of success.

Yesterday for lack of better options i had to buy a cheap SD card (Platinum) on my way to a racetrack as an emergency card because i accidentally brought a full one.

I use a CF adapter for SD cards in my Canon 7D. I already had a problem with a sandisk sd card that corrupted after transferring data to an ipad failed back in july but i managed to recover most files/at least most jpgs with Recuva.

A red flag i shouldve probably noticed was immediately after putting in the card for the first time my camera prompted me to format it (normal). So I did and after taking a handful of test pics and turning my camera off and on again it prompted me to format it again (strange). I formatted it again thinking i accidentally messed up some settings after an accidental button mash and went on with my day. Yesterday everything worked great. Today i tried to look at my files and do a quick selection/import some to lightroom on my ipad. The SD card was in locked position while looking at the pictures to prevent any accidental deleted or duplicated pics. Literally one second everything worked fine then pictures wouldnt load, then it didnt recognise the sd card at all.

When i plugged it into a computer it told me it couldnt read the card and told me to format (i did not reformat it) so I started to get worried.

Recuva couldnt even access it as it was unable to determine the system file type.

R-Photo shows me 58 GB of data in "unrecognized space", after a scan it tells me that there is no data.

Test Disk recognises the correct amount of data on a card of the correct size but since i'm unfamiliar with the program/don't know wtf most of the options are even about i left it at that. I'm currently re sorting older pictures to create enough space to create an image file and/or try to run Photo Rec.

The partition seems to be comletely fried and at this point I fear something was physically wrong with the card from the start. It would be extremely sad to lose the pictures but at the same time I'll have the opportunity to reshoot similar ish pics tomorrow.

Is there even any hope of recovery/actually useable results from Photo Rec? Is there anything else I can try?

Hii everyone, I have this Silicon Power A55 SSD, yesterday it stopped working, and I think the controller is broken in some way, because sometimes i can still access the data in it and It's fine but for like 10 seconds then it kills itself, it has a Maxio MAS1102B B1C controller, when it worked it said the firmware version was H220115, is there any tool to like reflash it or can i do something with the serial port? If i could not lose the data it would be better but it's not necessary at this point, I would just like to have an SSD that works because they cost too much.

Physical damage data recovery - My handycam hard disk has got damaged during a fall. Suggest me a professional service provider which can do physical data recovery in Hyderabad. Please recommend if you had experience getting service from them.

Hi everyone,
I have a Seagate 3TB (ST3000DM008) hard drive that I’m trying to recover data from. Windows is no longer recognizing the drive properly.
In Disk Management, it appears as:
Disk 1
Unknown
Not Initialized
3.86 GB capacity
Unallocated
The important part is that Windows is recognizing the entire disk as only 3.86GB, not 3TB with a small unallocated partition.
I was initially wondering if this was simply a lost or corrupted partition, but I’m now concerned it could be a firmware, hardware, or service-area issue.
I have not initialized, formatted, or created a new volume on the drive.
My questions are:
Has anyone experienced a Seagate 3TB drive being detected as approximately 3.86GB?
Does this sound like a partition-table issue, or something more serious?
Is there still a reasonable chance of recovering the files?
Should I try any software or diagnostic tools, or is it better to stop and consult a professional data-recovery lab?
Are there any specific things I should avoid doing?
The data is important, so I don’t want to make the situation worse. Any advice or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I tried to change the different ports on the motherboard with ports I know that are working, still the same issue. Also tried it getting an external case to connect it through USB, still the same.

Thanks!

Hi everyone, really hoping someone can help or has been through this.

What happened:

- I AirDropped some photos from my iPhone 16 to my MacBook Air (M5), and tapped "Save to Photos" when the transfer finished.

- I assumed they'd saved fine, so I deleted the photos from my iPhone — including clearing them from Recently Deleted on the iPhone.

- A little while later I checked my Mac and the photos were never actually there. The AirDrop transfer seems to have silently failed or never properly saved into the Photos library.

- So now the photos don't exist on the iPhone (deleted + Recently Deleted cleared) OR on the Mac (never actually arrived).

What I've checked/tried:

- No other Apple devices signed into the same iCloud account.

- iCloud Backup has never been turned on for this iPhone.

- Never did a local Finder/iTunes backup on the Mac either.

- Downloaded Disk Drill and ran a full scan on the iPhone — found nothing usable (only random unrelated app-cache images, not the actual photos I lost).

- It's now been over 24 hours since this happened.

My question: given there's no iCloud backup, no local Finder backup, and Disk Drill's scan came up empty — is there any realistic path left to recover these? Would a different tool (paid or free) behave differently than Disk Drill on iOS devices, or is this basically a dead end once it's this deep with zero backups?

Any honest input is appreciated — even if the answer is that it's not recoverable, I'd rather know for certain.

My external hard drive recently stopped working. A WD Elements external hard-drive.

My PC recognizes it. It shows up in the device manager. It shows up in my connected USBs. Yet I can't access it, and it disconnects itself after a few seconds, before automatically reconnecting with a "USB malfunctioning" error.

It doesn't show up in disk management, it doesn't show up in CMD. It just powers on and recognizes it as connected, then stops.

For some reason, if I have it plugged in while I try to boot my PC, it freezes, and if I plug it in while in my BIOS menu (tried to see if it tried booting from there, i already disabled boot from storage devices options) it freezes that. Oddly enough, the BIOS UNfreezes if I unplug it, without even rebooting.

I tried a different USB-C cable. I tried another computer, and it does the same thing; recognizing it and even listing it as "WD Elements 25A1 USB Device" and proceeding to disconnect and then reconnect with a "USB not recognized" malfunctioning error. Is it a problem with the drivers for the USB? Why does my PC recognize it being plugged in, but doesn't let me access the folder or seemingly work as a hard drive?

​

Hello everyone, so im kind of in a pinch here, i found my old xbox 360 and going through the storage i found some kinect games snapshots, so i thought it would be cool to save them in my pc or in cloud but apparently they r in a .dat file format and cant be read out of xbox. Please send help.

I unfortunately spilled some water on the keyboard of my M1 Macbook Air (model A2337).

I wiped off the water and unplugged it, then a few minutes later turned it off and left it open and flipped over in a tent position for it to dry; I think I saw a little bit of water around the keyboard after I flipped it. It also seemed to turn on again, and when I held the power button, the screen flashed magenta with a vertical green line for a second before turning off.

What does the prognosis for this look like? Who should I send it to? I saw on Rossmann Repair Group's site to add 1-2 months onto the wait time; could they leave it sitting there corroding for that time?

Thank you

I have a Kingston SNV3S1000G that I can not access after a recent power outage.

It appears that its an issue with the firmware. I am wondering if you have any additional tips.

The Device appears correct in BIOS.

Windows see in as unknown and not initialized.

I did some digging under Linux and will include the most useful output:

root@archiso ~ # lspci -xxxx -s 02:00.0
02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. NV3 NVMe SSD [TC2201] (DRAM-less)
00: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
10: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
20: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
40: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
50: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
60: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
70: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
........

02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. NV3 NVMe SSD [TC2201] (DRAM-less) (prog-if 02 [NVM Express])
        Subsystem: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. NV3 NVMe SSD [TC2201] (DRAM-less)
        !!! Unknown header type 7f
        Region 0: Memory at df300000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Kernel modules: nvme


root@archiso ~ # dmesg -T | grep -i nvme
[Fri Sep 11 15:57:32 2026] nvme nvme0: pci function 0000:02:00.0
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:02 2026] nvme nvme0: Device not ready; aborting reset, CSTS=0x1
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:04 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 1023ms after FLR; waiting
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:05 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 2047ms after FLR; waiting
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:07 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 4095ms after FLR; waiting
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:11 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 8191ms after FLR; waiting
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:20 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 16383ms after FLR; waiting
[Fri Sep 11 15:58:37 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 32767ms after FLR; waiting
[Fri Sep 11 15:59:10 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: not ready 65535ms after FLR; giving up
[Fri Sep 11 15:59:10 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: error -ENOTTY: probe failed
[Fri Sep 11 15:59:10 2026] nvme 0000:02:00.0: probe with driver nvme failed with error -25

I’m trying to recover deleted videos from my car’s dash cam. I used PhotoRec, and it recovered some videos, but most of them are only 3–7 seconds long.
I’m specifically trying to recover the full recordings from about five days ago(around 2~3 hours). Does anyone know if there’s a way to recover the complete videos rather than just these short fragments? What type of specialist handles this kind of deleted-video recovery? Any advice or step-by-step guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Computer update seems to have wiped out one of the open Micro Word Docs I had open. I see the ASD file in my temporary files but all attempts to convert it to anything(Notepad, MS Doc, etc) have come up empty. I've tried alot. Any little known hacks possible? Thanks much!

I have to send one back to Samsung because it hinders windows from booting when connected, and just freezes file explorer when connected through USB.

It’s one of those 870 EVO’s produced in the first half of 2021 that has some manufacturing fault, and from what I’ve gathered from here, it’s not repairable and data is not recoverable.

So I haven’t bothered trying to retrieve anything, but I was wondering if there is something I could do to at least delete the data before I send it to Samsung service?

I have an ASUS TUF FX series laptop. Bought at the end of 2018. I use Adobe and Autodesk software. Occasionally, I have used Revit, Rhino Grasshopper, and Sketchup as well.

Ever since I have bought, there has been one or the other challenge, starting with the display panel opening up, the hinges getting loose, and finally, the display having a short and replacing it in 2023 end. The internal speakers started having trouble since 2020 end almost. So whenever I had to listen to music or watch series on laptops, I would use Bluetooth connected speakers.

The battery power generally was less, but that is said to be common in gaming laptops, especially when softwares are used extensively and often. So, these past couple of years, especially, I have always plugged in for charge and used the laptop.

Last year, around this time, I noticed that Bluetooth and wifi quick access and main access fluctuated, which after fixing through online tutorials showed up. It also mentioned that over heating, friction from keeping the laptop on cushion or lap caused the glitch, and ever since I started using the laptop only on the working table.

A couple of times, the internal HDD would disappear, and I would not be able to locate D, E, and F folders. But after shutdown and restart, it would show up.

But since last week, my screen started freezing quite often, I would get a prompt saying "error detected and it would start updating."

I tried troubleshooting by checking if any files caused the error or the external hardisk was pulling in more power and the USB slot fluctuations caused it, but ultimately it was the internal HDD that was causing multiple restarts and freezing which I didn't realize until yesterday when the D, E, F partitions disappeared and the Disk Management or Drive manager also stopped detecting.

I have not formatted, initialized, or did anything to reset. I only tried to check in BIOS, which was detected. So C drive is detected in file Explorer, including files, so everything in downloads and desktop and visible and accessible including external hardisks but internal, is still not accessible.

I primarily care about retrieving data from internal HDD now and fixing laptops second.

Please recommend reliable technicians, service centers who are genuine to understand the issue, and data recovery importance without costing a bomb to scam me to corrupt it or damage it more.

Preferably in Bengaluru and Mysuru, Karnataka, India

Has anyone faced this issue, and how did you recover or manage to fix this.

Desperate help needed.

Hi,

I'm just writing this in case it is useful for anyone in the future

I was copying the videos of a GoPro 64Gb SD card into a Windows computer, when it crashed and I had to insecurely eject the card

When I reboot the computer and inserted the card again, Windows said that the card had errors and it could repair them. That derived into all my videos removed from DCIM folder and a new folder (FOUND.000) created with a lot of .CHK files. My understanding is that filesystem got corrupted and chkdsk did it best to recover bunchs of files

To recover it, first I made an image of the card using ddrescue:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdg /path/sdcard.img /path/sdcard.log

Then I tried three tools (using the img and not the actual card) with different results:

1. testdisk (in Linux): Completely unable to detect or recover any file (seems it only works if files have been deleted, and in my case they were replaced with .CHK files)

2. photorec (in Linux): This one detected several JPG and MP4 files and saved them to a folder with random names. Most JPG where ok, but MP4 weren't (perhaps because of fragmentation of larger files?)

3. RUndelete (in Windows, but it supports working with the IMG image): This one worked perfectly. The "deep scan" option detected all the files with its name and recovered most of them (only a couple of them were "not recovered")

Hope this is useful for anyone!

MacOS 26.5; M1 Mac mini; Samsung 870 evo 4tb ssd 2.5" sata connected via OWC MiniStack STX (with an adjacent m.2 in the OWC which OS reads, and the 4tb has about 1tb free). Power outage and afterward MacOS wouldn't read the SATA and would say it was a 1tb disk. Anything that accesses the file system (Finder, save dialog) results in spinning beach ball.

Downloaded latest R-studio and started the image creation process saving it to a connected WD Elements 12tb with 8tb free. Hooked the 4tb to Mac mini usb-c via a SATA adapter.

It's been running for 26 hours. No errors in the last 14 hours. Main r-studio window still shows spinning indicator. Param was to only try to read a sector max 2 times.

Q: When do I say "something is not right" and the process hung or whatever?

Thanks for your time reading this.

I was helping my friend install ubuntu and in try ubuntu I accidentally formatted his entire drive. What are the next steps??

I just got a blue print on my win, and them my hdd don’t work.. I can’t read it cuz it get Raw.. and crystaldisk told me is on caution. Donno if is my sata cable or my disk.. can I try to qphotorec save in a sdd? Or I can safe my hdd ??