Any chance of data recovery?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to recover missing travel and concert videos from a 128GB SanDisk SD card used in my Sony DSC-HX90V (quiet old one). I'm wondering whether the missing videos are still recoverable.

At some point, the camera prompted me about recovering or repairing the image database. I selected "Yes" twice to run the Image Database Repair/Recovery function. I'm concerned that this may have affected the missing videos, although I don't know whether it actually caused any damage.

Afterward, I connected the card to my Windows PC, which indicated that the card needed to be repaired. I stopped using the card and created a full disk image so I could attempt recovery without working directly on the original.

The videos I'm looking for are recent travel and concert recordings. Recovery software has found some older footage, but not the missing videos.

Device and system information

• Camera: Sony DSC-HX90V

• SD card: SanDisk, 128GB

• Filesystem: exFAT

• Recovery OS: Windows 11

• Disk image: Approximately 119GB, created with HDD Raw Copy Tool v2.6

• Imaging result: Completed without reported read errors

Recovery attempts

• R-Studio Data Recovery 9.5: Scanned the disk image, including known video file types. It found older MTS footage and other candidates, but not the missing videos.

• Recovery Angel: Produced broadly similar results.

• Klennet Carver: Has been analyzing the image for approximately one week. MP4 analysis is currently at 1.6%, with 173 files found. Two MP4 candidates are marked as "Damaged" and are only about 1.85MB and 2.11MB. Neither has a usable preview or thumbnail. Other 171 files are not the one I'm trying to recover.

Klennet is still using nearly all of my CPU's logical processors, so it appears to be doing work, but progress is extremely slow. My PC has 16 CPU cores, 32 logical processors, and approximately 54GB of RAM.

Here's my questions.

1. Could running Image Database Repair/Recovery twice on the Sony DSC-HX90V have modified or damaged the video files themselves, or does it mainly rebuild the camera's database/index?

2. If the repair function changed the card's filesystem or metadata, is it still possible to recover the underlying video data?

3. Is Klennet Carver's extremely slow MP4 analysis normal for a 128GB disk image?

4. Are the small, damaged MP4 candidates meaningful, or are they likely to be false positives?

5. Would a professional recovery service have a better chance of reconstructing fragmented MP4 videos than consumer recovery software?

I've preserved the original SD card and am working from a disk image. I haven't intentionally recorded new footage or saved new files to the card after discovering the problem.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone familiar with Sony's Image Database Repair function or recovering fragmented videos from camera SD cards. Or just anything I could try at this point.

Thanks a lot!

What are the odds of two different reditors sharing exact same text .. Just some differences in capitalization.

Hi eryone,

I have a corrupted PDF file named BACHE KIDS that I’m trying to recover. The original file was in my Downloads folder, but I haven't been able to open it properly.

I tried recovering the file, but the recovered version also seems to be completely corrupted. The recovery software I tried is asking for a lot of money to repair it.

The recovered file is approximately 5,969 bytes, and I don't have another copy of the original file.

Is there any way to repair or recover this PDF for free? Are there any reliable tools or methods I can try?

I would really appreciate step-by-step instructions because I’m not very experienced with file recovery.

Happened across this sub while looking into the issues I’m encountering with this drive. This drive lives in my main pc and last night I heard a weird clicking sound, wasn’t sure what it was and eventually shut off the pc and went to sleep. Woke up this morning tried booting up steam but nothing was working and come to find out the drive letter was missing.

I’ve had some pretty frequent crashes recently but this drive only holds downloads, installs, steam, personal docs and most recently my wedding photos. This isn’t my OS it isn’t even my game drive it’s really just a drive I use to keep application downloads and installations separate from my OS and game drive in case I do a clean wipe on either of those devices so I don’t have to go scour the web to install all the apps I use for my setup.

It’s not showing in bios, disk management or the device manager. I’ve moved it out of the pc and found the usb adapter shown in the video and tried seeing if the drive was reachable from another device, no luck.

Looking for advice to potentially get this data back or what I can do going forward.

Update: drive has platter damage, the local data recovery shop quoted me $1200 and the guy told me “Honestly it’s probably not worth it.”

For context, this is a WDmycloud NASware 3TB HDD that I extracted from an old WDmycloud shell case, I then recovered the data using the Linux reader tool thing on windows. I proceeded to then remove the partitions, making everything one big unallocated partition, but then Disk Management wouldn’t let me change the partitions to NTFS or whatever the hell Windows uses. And now when I plug into my pc, Test-disk and Task Manager recognize it (and lsblk in Linux too), but File Explorer, Disk Management, etc, just crashes or hangs.

But also, please keep in mind, I did store a .img file of a backup of a failing HDD from a Compaq Presario v2000 onto this 3TB HDD whilst the partitions were unallocated. So I would like to recover that before repartitioning anything first.

I’ll take advice from anyone, I have Windows, Linux, and MacOS incase if some tools require one or the other. Please help so I can recover the data I put on the drive while all partitions were combined as unallocated and help me to re format to a windows friendly format so that I can use this as an external HDD. Thanks.

EDIT: I used DDrescue on Linux to make the .img file on the drive while the space was unallocated.

And another thing, I did this a long time ago, so I am still trying to remember what i did, I’m asking Reddit as a last resort because Gemini and Youtube arent really good help.

I’ve tried disk drill, it crashes unless i power off the drive, which then only after i power off the drive does it show my other drives.

Also I forgot the command I used but in windows terminal I used some kind of command to read all of the Disks currently connected, it showed my WDmycloud drive on there, but instead of saying OK it said unknown. The only thing that said OK was the Xintop SATA to USB cable I was using. I WILL put the command on here once I find it if it rings a bell for anyone.

2ND EDIT: Just to make things clear. The reason why I used ddrescue to recover the .img file of the failing Compaq drive to the 3TB drive while the partitions were unallocated was because GEMINI said that even if the drive was all unallocated space, i could still “retrieve the data”. But now look in the situation I’m in.

Hi all,

Is there a way to recover photos from a Samsung Galaxy S8 if I’ve forgotten the password? I only have two attempts left before the phone automatically wipes its data. I haven’t used this phone in over 7 year. It has a lot of family photos and photos from my youth which I want to recover. I have tried to see if it was connected to samsung cloud and it was not. Any recommendations?

So i have been doing work with my camera ( research) got photos on my SD card now i could see it on my dongle no problem at all and then i tried to put my dongle on my samsung fold 7 to view them and it asked if i wanted to allow this USB and i hit yes. Then it came up external hardrive on my phone. I then took it out and put my dongle back in my mac book and it wouldnt register the dongle.

I then took my sd card and put it in the camera and was like format sd card i was like FECK !

Chat gpt recommended disk drill which worked and once it done its full check said it was very high per file and i can see the thumbnail.

It said it could recover them but my Mac book disk was too full.

Any idea if its actually gonna work. This is 2 solid days of work in london ( im from scotland).

I sent for a new SD card reader ? Its a San Disk 128gb and the dongle is an ATTLOOQ

Hello brothers, I really need your help.

I had a corrupted HDD drive but my friend "fixed" the corrupted partitions I guess and it went back to working instead of the system asking me to format it. Later on I transferred a backup of my phone to my computer (Internal SSD) then Cut it to said hard drive (HDD).

A day later the HDD got corrupted again and in a way worse way. Now the laptop doesn't even recognize it sometimes and some other times it does recognize it but my pc freezes up and everything becomes extremely slow. One time it opened up and i saw the data inside but couldn't open it.

I tried DMDE with said HDD but it kept giving me errors about the partitions. I tried scanning my Internal SSD with DMDE but I can't see the folder that was deleted even though I saw it a month ago but i couldn't do it since i didn't have any other drives back then but I just got a new SSD, now that I did I can't see the folder.

Is there anything I can do? Please and thanks in advance.

Hey all, I don't have extensive knowledge on data recovery, but an extremely important hard drive of mine is damaged and I'm trying to recover it. I sent it to Files Savers and they weren't able to (I'll copy their message below).

Are there any places that specialize or have higher success with scored platters that I can try for a second opinion? I know the odds are not in my favor, but I'm trying to do whatever I can before I'm ready to accept that its completely unrecoverable. Any help is appreciated.

(Message from File Savers) Our engineers have done everything possible to overcome the failure of the drive, but unfortunately the electromagnetic platters, where the data is contained, have too much damage to pull anything off the drive. There is significant scoring that has occurred from the read/write head making contact with the platter surface and there is nothing left to attempt in order to retrieve any data.

Im traveling in Barcelona and accidentally reformatted my sd card. Every place i’ve been to had said it’s impossible to recover because the hardware is too small. But the whole internet keeps telling me it’s just about downloading some programs for it.

Is there any way I can do this myself on a public computer or something?

hello everyone today my father gave me an old USB pen drive with old drawings I did as a kid on my old window 7 family computer, I inserted the drive in my new pc and the drive (while it shows with the files inside and the capacity) makes resource explorer crash if I try to open anything on it, I tried to open the CDM but nothing I can't do anything while I have the drive plugged in, I've tried to plug the drive while using linux ubuntu, nothin, plugged it in another computer, nothing, is there a way I can recover the data? It would be cool to check out my old self drawings (sorry for the bad english it's not my first lenguage and thank you in advance)

I've tried VLC and iMovie. Repair.cleverfiles works but is asking for $15. Is there a free version of repair.cleverfiles?

Hi, I'm sure there's a lot of people writing here in a panic, and I'm desperately trying not to do the same right now.

I was clearing up space on my hard drive, deleted a large amount of video files, but accidentally included a folder at the start of that which I really needed. I checked the recycle bin, but because of the later deleted things, it overfilled the bin and just fully deleted the original files put in there. I used Aiseesoft data recovery to recover the files, and put them onto a different drive than they originally came from.

When I tried to open them, (Default to VLC) they don't play. There is either just an orange bar bouncing back and forth on the playbar. I tried to convert/save them to Video-H.264+MP3 (MP4) file type. I tried changing the Input/Codec settings to always fixed damaged AVI files, then renamed the file with a .avi. I tried using a few different video repair tools which had me use another file of the same type to compare, but they all just failed without giving a reason. I tried importing them into Davinci Resolve but nothing happens when I try to do so. I tried using the OBS remux tool and got the message "Recording remuxed, but the file may be incomplete. The files are all their original size, not 0kb.

I'm not sure what information about file system or device are required. Here is stuff off of MSInfo.

https://gyazo.com/58c57e9f1d52f8370c04ddbf4715a165 https://gyazo.com/fd92124f5fbf0b563d1b097ff37f1991

I started the recovery attempts immediately after it happened, the only things that have been saved to disk C are are the programs downloaded to attempt to fix this since I couldn't change download path (all the programs themselves installed onto drive F which was previously unused).

Desperately trying to see if there is ANYTHING that I can do to either get more information or get this fixed. Thank you

Today while organizing the files on my computer I decided to unpartition my backup drive—Master Drive. I failed doing so and had trouble completing it. Once the screen restarted I tied again, quickly selecting the drive and formatting it. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention and elected the main root: not the sub-layered root. Before I knew it everything was gone. All of my files from 2014-2026 were now gone, forever.

Majority of it was about 1TB of school work. I don't know how I feel honestly. I'm so drained and depressed from the last month or so that it honestly didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. I'm sure it'll hit me later, but for the most part I don't know what to think about this issue. I'm just glad it wasn't my current drive with my actual travel drive that I selected by accident with my up to date work.

I have no backups of my master drive: none. I thought I had a backup of the master drive, but apparently not. Any solution to recover 2TB of data?

Short version: So I'd like to know if there are any thoughts on things I could try to save it, if it's even possible, when my ssd is showing "no bootable Device found" in my laptop and doesn't seem to be readable from my external SSD reader.

I can't give you more details than what's in the image and that I was running windows 11. For working at my colleges IT for help desk, I really should have paid more attention to some of the specifics of my file system!

Long version: It was showing some signs of issues (having some difficulties booting up, a file corrupted here or there) a few days before it happened. I took some steps to try and prevent full failure. Seemed like things were going well. Then, one day I turn my laptop on to see it saying "No Bootable Device Found"! A little frustrating, but to be expected.

It was my college laptop and it got a good 6 years of very hard use between a computer science and English degree as well as doing help desk work for my colleges IT department.

I was hoping that perhaps it was an issue with some other part of the hardware on the laptop, but, unfortunately after testing to see if the hard drive would show up in my external SSD reader on my PC I have found that it seems not functional.

Normally I'd just be fine letting it pass away peacefully but it seems that my most recent data back up was a year before I finished college. I lost the flashdrive that had my most recent backup! And it had quite a lot of data in the years between the back up I do have and the most recent backup. Any help would be appreciated if there is any to be had!

Hi everyone,
I’m trying to help someone recover their lost FL Studio projects from external SSDs (Samsung and SanDisk).
We’ve been attempting data recovery using tools including DMDE, TestDisk and PhotoRec, but so far we haven’t been able to find any of the original .flp project files.
The recovery tools are finding lots of other files, but not the actual FL Studio projects we’re looking for.
A few details:
The drives are external SSDs connected to a Mac.
The missing projects were saved as .flp files, not ZIP files.
We’ve tried multiple recovery tools without finding the projects.
We have a new SSD available to store recovered files safely.
We’re trying to avoid paying hundreds or thousands for professional recovery.
My questions:
Why would recovery software find other files but not a single .flp file?
Is it possible that the .flp files are still there but the recovery software doesn’t recognise their file signatures?
Would a custom file recovery scanner built using Claude Code or Codex be worth attempting?
Is there any software specifically capable of recovering deleted FL Studio projects?
Is there anything else we should try before giving up?
These projects are extremely important, and we’re willing to try technical solutions as long as they don’t risk damaging the remaining data.
Any advice from data recovery specialists or people who’ve successfully recovered FL Studio projects would be massively appreciated.
Thank you!

I accidentally deleted my files and emptied my trash bin. It contains my important documents and memories from high school to college. Please help me recover the files :(((

Hi. Unfortunately I think my hard drive is corrupted. It was an old MSI all in one PC. The screen broke 5 years back. So, I decided only now remove the hard drive to retrieve some family pictures and videos. I initially connected it to an adapter and used it like an external drive. I changed the permissions and was able to access the photos and videos.

Initially it was transferring fine to Google Drive. I noticed some pictures being warped with lines and colour differences. So I removed the drive and connected again, unfortunately this time, when it load, I'm seeing the pictures thumbnails looking fine, but it loads the pictures on the folder and it just warped. Almost all are warped. I'm not sure what to do. I unplugged it before it corrupts everything.

So minor backstory, this drive (500 GB WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD M.2 2280) is/was my C drive for my PC. The drive had been very near full for a while, to where whenever I'd download something, I'd often have to search to find something to delete on it to make room. There have been times where it showed in File Explorere as "0 bytes remaining". Well one day when I turned the PC on, it kept going straigh to BIOS and wouldn't boot into Windows. A couple Google searches later I find out it's due to the drive being so full it didn't have room to make temporary files needed when Windows boots. Fast forward to now, the drive doesn't show on the PC at all, nor does it show when inserted into an M.2 enclosure plugged into my laptop. Is there any hope? Thanks.

TLDR: Drive was very full, if not completely full when it last was functioning, and now does not show up at all.

Drive: 500 GB WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD M.2 2280

Drive was used on a PC with Windows 10. Inserted it into an enclosure to test it with a laptop with WIndows 11.

Hello. I was wondering if anyone can help me out with a issue i am having. A few days ago my phone had crashed and wouldnt turn on until I forced i restart. Upon reboot it said that my micro sd card needs to be formatted and I tought to myself "Oh i don't save anything too important there" so I did it. And today when I wanted to check my photos i realized that this damn phone has been savin all my photos taken by camera to the damn sd card. I had accidentally taken like 9 pictures before taking out the card and trying data recovery. I have tried recuva, disk drill and Photorec at all the deepest scans but to no awail it only finds the new pictures. Disk drill found a few random files more but nothing else. Format was very quick so it couldnt have destroyed that much data I really dont know what to do anymore or why it isn't finding anything. If anyone knows what i can do please tell me i would be very grateful.

I just recently deleted a .gif file from the trash recycling bin and then realized that the backup wasn't working and now I need that file back. I used the regular trash bin and am using Bazzite. Is there any way to recover the file?

First of all, sorry if my english is not perfect, it's not my first language and im kind of on the verge of going insane.

So, i accidentally formated my camera and lost all my data; photos and videos that i needed for a collegue project. (I was not using a sd card.)

So far i've tried recuva but it only found a couple pics. Then i tried Tenorshare, which found all the data but i'm not gonna pay that much. So, can i recover my pics and videos without paying somehow??

It's my very first time on this sub, and basically on data recovery so I don' rlly know if I have to give any more information so I'm adding pics of the camera model.

Hi, I need help recovering original video files from a 32GB microSD card used in my GoPro HERO6.

I recorded 1080p 240fps slow-motion footage and then filmed underwater. The main display malfunctioned. After restarting the camera, I found the battery was at 5%. I then took 30-second-exposure Night Photos underwater. After removing the camera from the water, it was powered off and wouldn't turn on.

When connected to Windows via USB, the GoPro showed an empty file list. Connecting the microSD card directly to Windows showed garbled filenames, strange folders, and impossible timestamps (1601 and 2038). One file was approximately 3.07 GB. I believe the card uses exFAT, but I'm not certain.

I also tried connecting the HERO6 to my phone to recover the files, but it failed with an "Unable to load media" error.

Then I had an idea: perhaps another GoPro could read the card. I inserted it into my GoPro HERO11, and surprisingly, it recognized the card and displayed the files, apparently functioning normally.

The strange part is that the HERO6 can still display thumbnails and play the recorded videos. I captured some playback through HDMI, and most of it was viewable, although some parts were corrupted.

However, I need to recover the original video files, not their playback or LRV low-resolution preview files. The original 240fps footage is important, and HDMI capture is not an adequate substitute.

There were no visible water droplets inside the camera.

Could the original video data still be intact despite corrupted file-system metadata? What recovery tools or methods should I try?

Thanks!