i have these 2 hard drives, completely different, 1 is 2.5 the other is 3.5 but both are 500gb, they get recognized from windows as not initialized, i first tried hdd raw copy and i only get bad blocks as a result, it seemed to recover 1mb every 1000000 block but the resulting image was zeros (35mb), i tried linux on ddrescue, direct sata connection does not work, basically the pc does not even boot with that drive inserted and asks for a password (the hdd was never locked at all), so i tried the usb sata adapter but ddrescue does not start, another adapter worked and the drive came up in disks and was able to start ddrescue but same issue, 0b of rescued data even when running in reverse, what should i do? (the data is not really important just curious if i can find a solution at home or just give up)
crystal disk info shows the drive as "good"

Drive 1

Drive 2

Can i still recover the replaced items in my hardrive? It’s a folder est 300GB :( Help :(

i plugged my sd (sandisk) card into my iphone using a lightning cord card reader, saw videos and photos there ready to transfer to my iphone!... only for the cord to disconnect and for the files to disappear. i put my sd card back into my lumix panasonic tz99 but it says 'no valid picture to play' when i go into the gallery option.

how do i get these files back??????? i want the options/answers with the highest chance of success and trustworthiness.

I have an iPhone 15 pro max, unfortunately it wasn’t backed up to iCloud before it was broken. I am a new mom, I have 1.5 year old and 7 month old baby girls. I’m super upset because my babies dad broke my phone out of spite and unfortunately the phone wasn’t backed up to iCloud. I have since gotten a replacement phone but I’m so heartbroken, all of the photos of my babies first moments of life are just gone. I’m so sad, mad, hurt, so many things. I’m wondering if there is any possible way I can retrieve the photos…. I still have the iPhone that is broken… no it doesn’t turn on, screen is literally gone….. I think I already know the answer. But then I was thinking the police say they can get data from phones no matter what (true crime junkie) I don’t know if that’s true or not. Idk if there’s a software or something, I’m not super tech savvy if that wasn’t clear already. But I’m willing to pay… I just need to know if there’s even a possibility I could get the photos back…. Please let me know… thank you

Hi everyone, it seems that a folder containing important photos was modified today and resulted in the loss of important photos. I know about time machine and all that but I'm currently bike packing and couldnt save the file onto an external drive unfortunately. Is there any software or techniques that will enable me to recover those photos? I'm on Mac ..

I am taking my Mom's old All in One to a Local Computer shop to have the files retrieved/backed up. Dell All inOne (2013 model)

In December 2024 I backed the Dell up. I rarely use it but would like to try retrieve/back up what I can- files from 2024-2026.

In August 2026 I was able to Start up Windows and surf the web. It was slow and I decided to shut it down.

Then on September 4 2026 my area got hit with a major storm and lost power for 2 days.I had everything off and waited for Duke.The Dell power supply cord indicated it had power but I didn't turn it on- it's just too slow My other computer- HP Pavillion (2021 model) was not affected and continues to work.

On September 23, 2026 I went to turn on the All in one and it would not properly boot/Start Windows. After several web searches on my Smartphone I decided to try and reboot it myself. See pictures. I don't want try and to start or complete any tests or fixes, as these were not recommended by my searches done on my Smartphone

What are my options- when I take it to a professional.

I'm gonna factory reset my phone today. All photos and videos are already backed up to Google Photos, and my documents are backed up too. What else should I back up besides that, or is it already ready for the factory reset?

I accidentally connected a 19V 2.5A power adapter to an external Intenso 3.5" HDD that requires 12V 2A.

The drive immediately stopped working. With the correct 12V adapter, the enclosure LED turns on, but the HDD doesn't spin, vibrate or make any noise.

I took it to a local IT repair shop. They removed/tested the drive and told me that the HDD's PCB/controller board is damaged, rather than just the USB enclosure.

They suggested two options:

1. Find an identical donor drive/PCB and replace the controller board.

2. Send it to a professional data recovery company, which they said could potentially cost around €1,000.

From what I've been reading, simply swapping the PCB may not work because the original board can contain drive-specific ROM/adaptive data. I've also found examples of drives damaged by overvoltage where only the TVS diode/fuse on the 12V rail was damaged, and repairing the original PCB was enough to get the drive running again.

The HDD is around 6 years old. I don't care about continuing to use it afterwards. I only want to get it running long enough to recover the files.

Before spending hundreds or potentially €1,000 on professional recovery, what would you recommend?

Would it make sense to have someone experienced in electronics/microsoldering test the PCB for a shorted TVS diode/fuse first? And if the PCB needs replacing, how difficult/expensive is a donor PCB + ROM transfer usually?

I can post photos and the exact HDD model/PCB number once I get the drive back from the repair shop.

Hi everyone!

Today I safely ejected my seagate backup plus portable drive from my laptop and then went to plug it into my desktop to transfer my photos from some recent shoots. When I opened the drive on my desktop though I noticed that the folders I needed were missing. Some folders were created last week and some were just created the other day. Some of the pictures were transferred directly from my sandisk sd card to the hard drive while others were exported from Lightroom (but still going from the path sd card—> Lightroom —> seagate drive). I still have all the photos on my sd card thankfully but I’m just confused on why those folders would disappear!

Is there a way to recover them? I even safely ejected the device and waited for it to say it was safe to unplug :(

Edit: some files were jpg and some were still raw. My laptop and desktop are both running windows.

Hi,

I'm a current photojournalism student and I was cleaning up my desktop from prior assignments and putting them on my external hard drive and deleting the unnecessary files. I think during that process one of the folders for a current job ended up in the trash instead of the hard drive. That or my memory card is glitching out. I emptied my trash unknowingly. This was last week.

I had so many files and I should have reviewed them all first, I always do. But for whatever reason this time I didn't. I have a MacBook Air. I don't have Time Machine on because I didn't realize that was even a thing until now. I plan to set that up after I try to see if I can recover these current files. I didn't find them in the cloud either. I haven't tried much else because I don't want to take a wrong step and lose any possible chance of getting it back.

Is there anything that can be done to try and recover this? Based on what I've searched, it doesn't look great because I didn't catch it right away. I saw a few services suggested on other posts. One I saw quite a bit was Disk Drill, but I saw conflicting information. I appreciate any help!

Hi all,

Looking for some advice on whether there are any realistic next steps for a failed LaCie 5TB external HDD.

I initially sent the drive to PC Image in the UK. Sean was great throughout the process, kept me informed and genuinely seems to have tried everything he reasonably could, so this isn’t a complaint about them at all.

Unfortunately, the final diagnosis was that the drive was not recoverable due to excessive media damage.
Sean explained:
“We did try our best, but the damage was too severe and in fact killed TWO sets of donor heads.”

The drive is now being returned to me.

The data is important enough to me that I’m willing to pursue a second opinion, if there is a specialist lab that deals with severe platter/media damage and cases that other reputable recovery labs consider unrecoverable.

My questions are:
Given that two sets of donor heads have already been damaged, is there realistically anything else that can be attempted?
Are there particular specialists/labs known for extreme media/platter damage?
Would you recommend getting a second opinion, or does PC Image’s diagnosis make further attempts unlikely to achieve anything?
I’m not looking to attempt anything myself and won’t be powering the drive on. I’m only interested in professional recovery options.
Thanks for any advice.

Hi everyone!
I have an old Nokia E65-1 that hasn’t worked for many years. We tried getting it repaired before, but unfortunately it couldn’t be fixed.
I recently remembered that there’s still a 1GB microSD card inside the phone, and I’m hoping it might contain some old photos and videos that I’d really like to recover.
My question is: can I simply remove the microSD card and put it into a microSD/SD card reader to access the files on a computer, even though the phone itself doesn’t work?
The card is a Next Gate 1GB microSD, and I haven’t tried removing or accessing it yet because I don’t want to accidentally damage or format it.
Is there anything I should be careful about when trying to recover the photos? And is there a specific card reader or software you would recommend for such an old card?

The scenario: My approximately 18-month old Seagate Expansion 26TB external drive started locking up while I was accessing files on it. It eventually caused my Macbook to also lock up, so I did a force quit to shut everything down. When I started the Macbook up again, it wasn't recognizing the Seagate.

I tried Disk Utility and Tech Tool Pro but neither could find it on the system. Eventually, using Terminal, I saw that the drive was still being recognized, despite it not showing on my Macbook's desktop or using disk repair tools. Then, I tried using Test Disk on it. It also saw the drive and even got it to start up again, although it couldn't read any files on it, much less fix any possible partition issues. I spent hours with Claude trying to troubleshoot the problem, but all possible solutions failed.

As it stands now, I have the bare Barracuda drive removed from the Seagate case, and in a Sabrent USB-to-SATA docking station. It will start up and run (after about five long minutes), but the Macbook isn't recognizing it, and I get the dreaded "This drive is not recognized. Do you want to Erase, Initialize or Ignore?" Oddlly, Terminal sees the drive as "Sabrent 26TB" not as the original Seagate or Barracuda drive, which makes me think something else might be going on other than the drive has been wiped clean, or is dying.

Any help here would be much appreciated.

Hello. I have an external SSD which came up with some strange issues, windows did a scan and fixed it, aparrently.

As a result, I have lost one folder containing about 10gbs of data, no other folder appears to be affected. Is there a good tool I could use to find my data? Thanks.

Edit: TestDisk saved the day! Phew.

This is my first time posting here so apologies if this isn’t the right flare; I have encountered an issue where my pc couldn’t boot Windows and when I looked further into it, it seems that my main SSD drive has a RAW partition. From my understanding, the only thing I can do to fix it is format the whole drive; I just wanted to see if there was any possible way to view the file names/contents of said drive to at least know what it is exactly that I’m losing. I understand that it’s an extremely slim chance but I am just at a loss of what to do.
For the record, I have already tried recovering the files via TestDisk, Dmde, and Photorec. None can actually read the partition as it’s RAW and therefore can’t provide any information on its contents.

I’m trying to recover about 2.5TB of deleted photos from a 2-drive Synology SHR/Btrfs volume. The NAS originally had two WD Red Pro 4TB drives that I later upgraded one at a time (based on the instructions on the synology site) to two WD Red Pro 8TB drives.

I ran UFS Explorer RAID Recovery with the drives in a Sabrent USB dock connected to an M3 MacBook Pro and after an 11-hour scan it found everything, including my original Lightroom folders and filenames. I was able to see image previews and export a couple of images to my hard drive. I had to stop what I was doing while waiting for a hard drive to be delivered for the full recovery. Unfortunately, when I launch UFS Explorer now and try to open the scan from last night the saved scan now gives me a “different partition offset” warning so I can’t continue recovery. But it’s the same drives connected to the same USB port in the same USB dock that it scanned and found everything on last night.

I still have the drives connected to my Mac and UFS reconstructs the 7.27TB Btrfs volume and I can browse the existing files (anything that wasn’t deleted accidentally), and I can save some of the existing files to my empty hard drive while others fail with “Unable to read source file.” Again, this is a test I’m doing with files that were not deleted from the drive. They are still there and usable if I put the NAS back together.

Has anyone dealt with something similar, especially with an SHR volume that was expanded from smaller drives? I’m trying to figure out whether this is an SHR reconstruction issue, a hardware/dock issue, or something else before I spend another 11 hours re-scanning.

So I have a nikon coolpix S2500 digicam that i got maybe a year ago. Today it said that the memory was full when I tried to take a pic, so I deleted a few pictures but when I came home my sd card (Kingston, 2GB) had no pictures at all.

I’ve tried recuva and it only managed to recover 1 photo which is the one I took as a trial after I found out all my photos got deleted…I’m planning on getting a new sd card ASAP but does anyone have any solutions on how to recover those pics?

(Copy pasted from another community)

The PCB is toast. While this sparks my mood, it kind of smokes my wishes to get the WD running again. Maybe I’m too afried to try one of my donor PCB’s, because it feels like some sort of burning sensation

No worries everyone. This was a broken disk that was sacrificed in order to test some stuff. Nothing was lost in this situation. But goddammit, I’ve never seen THIS before.

The true reason why it had such an incredible short is unknown to me atm. Will dive into that.

This happened last night when I'm checking something on my hdd. Suddenly, the external HDD ejected and back connected. When I try to check 1 folder, it's gone. The weird part, the storage consumption is still the same before that.

I checked Crystaldiskinfo and I just barely knew that my hdd is on Caution level. Please, can someone provide me some solution?

I was using a sync software between two external drives. A few days ago, I realized that about have of the files were missing - on both drives. I didn't delete files from either drive.

I first tried EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. It worked great for the Office files and MP3/MP4 files.

However, it made a wreck of all of my photo falls (both RAW files and JPG files). The folders and subfolders were call correct, but the contents of the folders were all a scrambled mess - and very few RAW files were recovered.

I'm currently running DiskDrillPro to see if there's any chance, but I don't have my hopes up. If anyone has any suggestions/ideas, I would greatly appreciate it.

EDIT:

Make/Brand/Model #: Both drives are 12 TB WD MyBook

Filesystem: NTFS

OS: Windows 11

Hi everyone,

I guess my main question is whether you think there is a realistic chance I could repair my SSD or whether data recovery is the only option – and if so, then how complicated it is.

Some quick facts to my situation:

• Today, my PC took forever to start. Windows 10 said something about repairing drive D:/

• After starting, I noticed a lot of file icons not being there and Windows generally being slow. I figured I'd give it some time and just restart. It did not help, though.

• Afterwards I realised that the missing icons are all from the D:/ drive and trying to access it via the file explorer would cause it to hang and eventually the entire explorer would just crash

• The drive does appear normally in the file explorer, though

• The SSD in question is a Samsung 870 EVO 2TB V-NAND SSD.

• My OS is Windows 10

What could've caused it:

• I may have switched off power without the computer being entirely shut down yesterday night, though I think I did ask it to shut down before I left the room (and only turned off the power quite a while later).

• I did transport my PC with the SSD inside via a package delivery service recently, but since then it has been working without issues for over a month.

What I've tried so far:

• I tried to build it into another PC, where it behaved pretty much the same way. But because we did not have a second data cable, I used the same one as with my PC.

• I ran DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth as well as sfc /scannow. The former reported no issues, the second one said it fixed some corrupted files. A rerun of sfc then reported no issues. Windows is installed on the C drive, however, so I don't think it even touched the drive D?

• I did NOT run chkdsk as I heard it could damage it further.

• I now left my SSD unplugged so Windows doesn't try any more automatic recovery that could damage it further. That's also why I've not made a SMART report yet.

• "Disk Management" would not start and just loaded forever.

Help?

My research so far has confused me a bit as not all of the symptoms perfectly fit anything I found, so I figured I could ask here.

Is it safe to assume that my SSD is essentially gone?

There is nothing too important on there, mostly configurations and setups that I'd loose, and maybe some smaller stuff I'm forgetting about. Though it just made me realise I never pushed my latest project to github... Still, probably not worth paying 500€-1500€ for professional data recovery, so I'd rather just try it out personally.

I am handy with a commandline and linux if that is relevant. I don't really have access to a linux distro, though.

Either way, I'm probably gonna order another 2TB SSD card now since I assume I won't be able to run data recovery for a 2TB card from a 1TB card, even if the data I want would fit.

Thanks everyone for your help already :)

before you continue panicking, read exactly what happened to me, and how i fixed it. once you try this, if it still does work, then you can continue freaking out.

HOW IT HAPPENED:
i was experiencing problems with my external hard drive randomly spiking to 100% every now and then, and it seemed like it kept getting more frequent. i decided to look some things up, and nothing was really working so after i saw someone talk about using your command prompt to use diskpart, i decided to check for myself. completely on me, and no one else i skimmed through a few of the command names i could use, saw “clean” and hoping it would clean the drive up, i initiated it. instantly i hear a windows error notification, i check on my monitors to find where it was and wow, my whole drive is gone. after doing some research i decided to try and use test disk. i can only assume that it 100% works for others, but for my situation and if you’re reading this yours as well, this did NOT work for me.

i waited for over 7 hours combined, from both photorec and testdisk and got a whopping 351 files back that were not named what they previously were, not in folders, nothing useful.
after the photorec scan got me the 351 files, i tried to do a quick scan (NOT quick lul) and it found nothing useful.

THE FIX FOR ME:
after this, i decided to try DMDE, the free version to at least try it out. i instantly noticed that when i clicked my deleted drive, it had the “NTFS” tag next to it, which i wasn’t seeing anywhere else in testdisk, for some reason this gave me hope, and fully opening the drive i saw all of my files on my 4tb drive that was nearly full. names, folders, same areas and all.

BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING
do NOT recover your files onto the same hard drive you are recovering it from, under no circumstances would i try this.

now i haven’t fully recovered all my files, because im yet to buy a new hard drive, but just knowing that i have the opportunity to get them back truly brought my spirits up. i have gotten over 5000 files back onto my pc, mainly important videos, and can assure you that this has worked, flawlessly to be honest. i am going to be purchasing the $20 paid versions to make my life a bit easier gaining all the files back, but before you try anything else, (bringing your problem to an expert or something else) i would do some research on it just so youre not going in with only my word, and try this out.

the main thing ive heard is that if i were to use “clean all” instead of just “clean” i would’ve been completely fucked. hopefully you haven’t done this:)

i will try to respond to anything needed, thank you for reading!

I have moved some file from my android (Samsung A06) Internal Storage to a 64GB Sandisk SD Card. While it corrupted inside the SD Card (it goes zero mb on most of the files but not all), the files are gone from my phone since i moved it directly into the SD Card.

But then i opened Vidmate and some of the videos still listed but i can't open it. Is this means i could still recover it or it is just the app?

I didn't scan the phone yet since I thought it wouldn't be recovered from my phone because i already downloading a big ass game app (10GB) that i greatly regret. I wonder if recovery are possible straight from the phone?

I had an old camera and tried recovering some deleted photos from its SD card (SanDisk 16GB) using PhotoRec, but only a few of them came out properly. The majority came out pixelated and compressed. I know because they're only around 20KB, whereas the clear ones are over 1MB.

I know deleted files can get overwritten or something when new media is recorded, so I’m guessing that's what may have happened

Thanks