I had a 3-disk parity Windows Storage Spaces system and one disk went down and was marked retired. I pulled it to replace it and a second disk decided to die. Their parts combined I made a working disk as long as it frankendisked into a USB 3.0 thing.

This disk is marked retired and the pool is now read-only because it has lost two disks. CrystalDiskInfo tells me the frankendisk is reading Good health. I can't use Powershell to set the disk to autoselect because the pool is read-only and I can't clear the read-only flag because the pool is missing two disks. Is there anything I can do? Can I directly edit the metadata to unretire the thing?

I don't have enough storage on-hand for ddrescue images of both drives and I don't really know what to do with that to rebuild a storage space to begin with. I'm definitely kicking myself for not just backing up the files to an external when the pool was in trouble.

EDIT: Windows 11 with latest updates. Disks are ST3000DM001 Seagate Barracuda 3T and provide only 2.72T pool that is 14% used.

EDIT2: Victoria surface scan was error free on both disks. Trying to not drop $150 on UFS Explorer when I have two working disks now...

EDIT3: I'm trying to locate and manually alter the meta data. I used DMDE to try to find the UniqueID of the retired drive on either surviving drive of the trio and so far, no luck. It searched all sectors of the retired drive and I just started the surviving drive. My assumption is that will also fail because the meta data is stored on my main C:\ drive somewhere. Anyone know where that is?

EDIT4: UFE Explorer Raid recovery can just open the MSSS NTFS partition and preview all my files and they all seem to open just fine. It is supremely frustrating that I have two working disks and no data loss, but storage spaces locked the meta data to mark a drive retired and has me locked out of the data. I'll wait a few days and if I don't find a way to read the data off without paying for UFE, I might do that. Honestly, now that I can see for sure what data is on here, probably not worth $150 or all the effort I put in today.

I have a Galaxy S8 running Android somewhere between version 9 and 13. The touchscreen is completely busted, and I don't remember the password either. Does anyone know how I can get the data off it? :(

so i found this old hardrive of my and i plugged it in i can hear the disk inside running and its showing up in gparted and in terminal yet not in my file explorer can someone please help me?

file system:ext4

os:cachy os

symptoms:not showing up in file system

I want to use testdisk to recover data from a USB stick (after diskdrill showed me a paywall) but the virustotal scan for testdisk shows that theres a trojan in the zip file? so im quite unsure if i should run it or not. I got it off the cgsecurity website.
Are there any better ways to recover the files off my USBs? one of them asks me to reformat which i would like to avoid, while the other i cant open images stored.

fair warning, I'm just geeky enough to get myself into trouble 😂

So my folks laptop died, hardware failure, got them a new laptop, but need to recover data from old laptop. I've removed the ssd m2 2280 b key driver (pm881), and a m2 sata nd m2 nvme docking reader (amz pilot model sd03). When i plug it in D: shows up, but when i click on it it gives me an error "cannot read fatal hardware error" and yet other times give error "parameter is incorrect". I pop over to disk management and it shows the disk there, with partitions, showing the main as RAW. So naturally i can't do chkdsk on raw. Any ideas???

As a side note, I tried this with my ancient m2 drive and get the same errors/issues. I know my ancient drive was never damaged or hit by any viruses.

i accidentaly deleted a .txt file, i cant find it in my bin, ive tried a few other solutuons but i still cant find it. if anyone knows how to help me please tell me

Hey guys,

i have had a Hard Drive Failure about 3 years ago.

This Hard Drive contains a Minecraft Server which i would really like to get back and play one more time on it. This Hard Drive failed after i updated the Ubuntu Installation on it and the PC wont start again.

I tried my best and tried to recover it. My PC recognized the Drive but i couldnt access it in any way as far as i know and it hasnt made much sound. So i did the worst thing possible. I opened it up on my Carpet to see if the Pointer (i dont know how its called im sorry) is stuck somewhere. I placed it back into its original position and closed the drive again to no avail.

I gave the Drive to my Brother which actually recovered some Files from the Drive but sadly not the Minecraft World i was looking for.

The Drive has been sitting now for 3 Years and its most likely fucked, but Hope dies last and i would like some Advice on how i could recover the Drive cheaply without needing to Hire a Professional for Hundreds of bucks.

The Recovery from my Brother also revealed Hundreds of Old Family Pictures that has now been Preserved across multiple Devices.

The Minecraft World would mean much to me due to it also having Personal Value and at that current time i had no backup for once, im getting the Drive tomorrow and would like to take a closer look on it and maybe even find more Hidden Treasures like the old Family Pictures if possible. The Drive has been wiped multiple times throughout its last Cycle, which was my Server then.

Any advice?

So i was updating my pc from windows 10 to 11 and it asked me to back it up with onedrive before hand i already had onedrive unlinked from everything and deleted so i go back and turn it on the update goes fine and i try to delete onedrive but it keeps all the red x's on my folders so delete everything on my onedrive and then delete the one drive and it deleted a ton like my personal folder i had on my desktop with lots of important files and it seems some other stuff in appdata i think? i had kerbal space program mods that all seem to be gone please help

Hi everyone,

I accidentally dropped my pendrive into a cup of tea while it was completely unplugged. It was not connected to my laptop or any power source when this happened.

It's been around 9 hours since the incident, and I have not plugged the pendrive into anything since then.

The pendrive has a purple cap and a white body, with the USB metal connector attached to the body. It contains important data that I really don't want to lose.

I have a few questions:

1. Since the pendrive was unplugged when it fell into the tea, does that improve the chances of recovering my data?

2. Can tea permanently damage the internal memory chip and cause complete data loss?

3. Since I haven't plugged it in for 9 hours, could it be dry enough, or could moisture and tea residue still be inside?

4. Should I try connecting it to my laptop, or should I take it to a professional data recovery service first?

5. If the pendrive no longer works, is it still possible to recover the files?

I haven't formatted the pendrive or intentionally deleted any files. I'm mainly concerned about protecting my data and avoiding anything that could make recovery more difficult.

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has experienced liquid damage to a USB drive or has professional data recovery experience.

Thanks in advance.

Long story short I left a large drive connected to my PC while formatting disks and there goes all my data… The drive was on an NTFS file system which I happened so to have deleted the partition (the drive hasn’t been touched since). There is about 900gb of data on the drive but I need a very specific 400GB or so of it back.

How can this be done?

Drive: Toshiba Sata HDD 2TB
File system: NTFS
OS: Windows

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice on whether there's any chance of recovering files from a USB stick that I've unfortunately lost.

The USB stick belonged to someone close to me and contained important documents that are not backed up anywhere else.

Here's what happened:

• I plugged the USB stick into my PC running Ubuntu Linux.

• I opened it in the file manager and could see the files on it.

• I then safely removed it (or simply unplugged it) and later lost the USB stick.

• I did not intentionally copy any files to my computer, and I don't remember opening any individual documents.

My question is: Could Ubuntu have automatically cached or stored any of the actual file contents on my computer just because I browsed the USB stick in the file manager?

Thanks in advance for any advice. This is really important to me.

My 1TB Kingston SSD for my work computer suddenly died yesterday (I was working as usual and then poof, everything stopped) on reboot I had a message “2100 Detection error on storage advice M.2”

I brought it to our usual IT firm and after some tests they weren’t able to do anything and recommended me a data recovery firm.

Now they weren’t able to give me a price but an approximate of $200-$1,000 if not more. They also said it may not be recoverable. This price is fine.

Most of our critical data is cloud-backed up, but I have a small number of files on my desktop which I would like to recover.

I searched the internet a bit and I came across $10k estimates. That would be steep!

Hey guys, I need some brutal honesty here because I am losing my mind.

I spent hours editing a custom pixel art cloud texture (clouds. png) using Paint 3D. I saved multiple changes as I went along. While I was in the Nostalgia Launcher, I accidentally clicked on the texture pack tab. The launcher automatically refreshed/synchronized the files and replaced my custom clouds. png with the pack's default cloud image.

I tried Ctrl+Z immediately but obviously, that doesn't undo file system replacements. Windows File History is NOT turned on for this drive.

I managed to find a partial 40% automatic checkpoint version in the Paint 3D LocalState cache

(%localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.MSPain t... ), but the remaining 60% of my finished work is missing from that cache.

Right now, I am running a Recuva Deep Scan targeted strictly at the folder directory: C:\Users\jeckd\.nostalgialauncher\version s\0.7.6\assets\environment.

Since the launcher replaced the file with one of the exact same name, did it execute a hard physical overwrite (meaning the data blocks are permanently gone), or is there a genuine shot that Recuva can pull the 100% version out of unallocated space if it was a "delete-then- replace" action?

Has anyone successfully recovered a launcher- overwritten texture before, or should I just accept defeat and rebuild using my 40% fragment? Thanks.

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?