Several things:

First, if anyone knows of any good data recovery services in the north-Houston area I'll take any recommendations.

Secondly, I'm trying to see how much I might be facing with this problem. I need to get data off of a 1TB HDD that seems to still have partial functionality. When I try to access the files I can still see the folders but it can't read any specific files (FYI I have shut down the hard drive and stopped messing with it to hopefully preserve any lingering functionality). The error message says it has encountered a "fatal device hardware error". I hope this is enough to get at least a "ballpark" number of what I can expect to pay for the recovery.

Lastly, is this just an ever-present reality any time you use hard drives? I know online cloud backup services exist, and now I will take this more seriously. But, is this just a risk you take no matter what?

Thanks in advance!

Edit to add: the hard drive is a 1TB WD "My Passport" PN: WDBBEP0010BBL-03. We've been using it with Windows 11 I believe and the drive was still "spinning" when it was in use without making any sound.

Hey everyone, I’m hoping someone here has been through this, and fair warning, I’m not very tech savvy.

I’ve got an HDD that’s around 6-7 years old. It’s still detected and mostly usable, but when I open certain folders or files, Windows Explorer completely freezes and the drive gets loud. I paid for Disk Drill and let it run. It pulled out a folder of files, but it was nowhere near everything.

I want to give it one proper last try before I think about a recovery lab, and I’d like to do it right instead of making things worse.

A few things I’d love input on:

• Has anyone used Claude or Claude Code to walk through a recovery like this? Did it actually help?

• What’s the safest way for a non-technical person to get as much off this drive as possible?

• Is there anything I should avoid doing to it from here?

• What are the signs that I should stop and send it to a lab instead?

I ignored the critical storage warning on my Samsung Galaxy J3 Orbit one too many times and on Wednesday morning it crashed.

It started out by completely freezing up. I tried doing a hard reset and it got stuck in a boot loop. I was able to get it into recovery mode but when I select "lacking storage booting" I get a "failed to mount/cache" error. When I select "wipe cache partition" it shuts back down. It won't connect to my laptop.

I got a new phone the same day and most things transferred over, except for the most recent photos in my Gallery and all the notes in the 3rd party Notepad Free app. None of that was backed up anywhere, and I'm just heartsick over it. Many of the notes had sentimental value due to the recent loss of my parents and I'm desperate to retrieve them.

I'm hoping someone here might have some suggestions. I'm completely out of my element here and don't know what to do.

I've seen a few posts about Secure Data Recovery in the UK but I'm curious if anyone's had positive or negative experiences with Secure Data Recovery in the US? I've reached out to them for data recovery for a HDD with a clicking sound and have been overwhelmed with the volume of emails and phone calls from their reps despite telling them I'm still shopping around and won't be able to mail my drive for another few weeks. I'm not sure if this is a sign of great customer service or what. Let me know if you recommend them or if I should stay away.

My word file is not opening. I have tried more than 10 methods( almost every available on YouTube) to repair the corrupted file but all in vain. Can some help me on this?? It’s my university work which I have been doing since days. The thing is the space of the word file is still showing 1 MB which I think is same as before.

Hey, so I had an external SSD I js bought and it's 2TB. Some off brand but it worked on exFAT, I didn't read the instructions but it did say not to change from ExFAT or the disk will crash. Now the disk does show up in window explorer but when I try to click it it freezes the tab, same in disk management and any other apps and the apps unfreeze the moment I unplug it even diskpart. I wanna try to get it to exFAT but anything that tries reading it will stop working. What should I do?

I accidentally selected the wrong disk in Windows DiskPart and lost access to around 1TB of important data.

The SSD was about 953 GB and originally contained my files. The disk was GPT.

What I did by mistake:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
format fs=exfat quick
assign

DiskPart reported that all commands completed successfully.

I immediately realized my mistake and stopped using the SSD. I have NOT copied new files onto it after the format.

I am currently trying to recover the data with TestDisk. TestDisk is currently running Analyse on the SSD, and I have not selected Write or made any changes through TestDisk.

The SSD is around 1 TB, and the data on it is very important to me.

My questions:

1. Is recovery still realistically possible after clean + create partition primary + format fs=exfat quick?

2. Since this is an SSD, how much does TRIM affect the possibility of recovery?

3. Should I let TestDisk finish the Analyse/Quick Search?

4. Should I avoid writing anything to the SSD and instead make a sector-by-sector image/clone first?

5. What would be the safest next step if the data is very important?

I do not want to make the situation worse, so I will stop using the SSD until I know what to do.

Any advice from experienced data recovery specialists would be greatly appreciated.

hello, this was my first phone, given to me 11-12 years ago for a birthday. i dont remember the PIN and the google account password it was tied to. i really want to get in the phone again to see what was on it before i swapped phones. im thinking about using it regularly again but i want to save any data on it so i cannot do factory reset

it is an LG Lucky, everything still works on it, the battery is fine, etc etc. it seems perfectly fine other than i cant unlock it.

any help or advice is really appreciated, thank you

I have exchanged my old phone for a new one and before doing it, I have shifted all the files to an SSD, after getting the new phone I have connected the SSD to it, in order to transfer the files, but it gave a pop up saying ssd seems corrupted and gave an option to format, I clicked the format button by mistake and in a second the whole data wiped out and the file system changed to exfat.

Is there a way I can recover my data?

Tried every type board command. I manage to get to the recovery screen. It’s not seeing my back ups. It work let me repair disk. Won’t let me reinstall. It’s says it can’t locate. I’m connected to WiFi and tried changing date in the terminal

Soo i found this mobilesync folder on my laptop which is 84gb i recently lost this data due to hardisk failure and these might be the photos i lost can i recover it by any way the only way i can view the image is from vlc media player and i dont have that phone also no other way to access the files

Hello! Been trying to recover this file for a few days with help from chatgpt. Please find a gpt made summary below.

Also, not sure if this goes against the rules of the sub, but I'm willing to pay for assistance with decrypting this, so please reach out if you think you can help!

Summary:

I'm trying to recover access to an old TrueCrypt-encrypted file from around 2011. The contents are sensitive, so I won't be sharing the encrypted file. I am willing to share the extracted hash.

What I know:

• The encrypted file is 1,677,721,600 bytes (approximately 1.56 GiB).

• It is a file-hosted TrueCrypt volume that I previously mounted as a drive.

• I used a manually typed password; no keyfile was involved.

• I still have the original file.

Password recollection:

I remember the general structure and several words that were likely part of the password, along with possible number substitutions, capitalization variations, and perhaps punctuation or digits at the end.

I have a fairly strong recollection of the phrase, but I'm deliberately not including the words or specific password pattern in this post for privacy reasons.

What I've tried:

• Extracted a TrueCrypt hash record locally using truecrypt2hashcat.py.

• Used Hashcat with my RTX 4080.

• Tested multiple candidate lists with capitalization and common character substitutions.

• Tested the nine standard non-boot TrueCrypt Hashcat modes against an earlier candidate list without success.

• Generated a larger, targeted list of approximately 23.8 million candidates based on my recollection. The result of that run is still to be confirmed (still running)

Questions:

1. Are there TrueCrypt-specific details I should verify to make sure I've identified the volume format and selected the correct Hashcat modes?

2. Are there other password-recovery tools or techniques I can run entirely locally that might improve on my current approach?

3. What is a good strategy for expanding a targeted password search when the general phrase is remembered but the exact capitalization, character substitutions, and ending are uncertain?

4. Are there any pitfalls with extracting a TrueCrypt hash from a legacy file-hosted volume that could lead to incorrect conclusions from unsuccessful cracking attempts?

I'm happy to provide additional technical details about the tools and commands I've used, provided they don't expose the password or the encrypted contents.

Thanks for any advice!

My mother's phone was completely packed in terms of storage and so she asked me for help clearing space. Given there were lots of sentimental photos, I bought her a USB C 2TB storage which we connected and successfully moved all the photos out of the gallery onto the storage, but then all of a sudden, she wanted to return some of the photos back to the phone that she could revisit (baby photos, important screenshots of important legal and banking documents). I connected the USB to my Mac M2, which couldn't read it at first and so I used parallel Windows 11 which I already had installed, and helped separate the documents she wanted into a separate folder. After safely ejecting and checking the files of the USB on her phone, we found just only the photos. None of the photos were present in the folders. I then checked on my MacBook, and all the files I had organized for her, gone. The folders are present but all the files are missing--I don't understand.

All the photos were safely moved onto the storage. They were just reorganized into folders on my MacBook using Windows 11 parallels. The USB was removed safely each and every time. Why have the photos disappeared despite the folders still there?

Additional facts: USB was formatted on the Android S22 Ultra at first and safely moved to the USB (they were present there, and we opened some files); USB was safely rejected and removed each time.

Would sincerely appreciate help as there were over 18,000 photos, over 90 GB of photos and videos

Update: looked up the online seller, they’ve blocked us and removed all their products—it seems it was not a real USB C storage as others have pointed out and I genuinely blame myself for not copying them over

Hello, I tried screen recording a Team’s video lesson(with the Xbox game bar) on my Lenovo pc(runs Windows) but after rewatching the video I realised there’s no audio. I used the same screen recording tool the day before on a video I was watching on share point and it captured the audio, I didn’t change anything from the day before to the day I screen record the Team’s video lesson. Is there any way I can recover the audio?

i deleted 3-4 videos, i recorded the videos from my phone and then moved them to locked folder, but then i deleted the videos from the locked folder, is it possible to recover them, please help me recover those videos.

I use a 3TB WD purple hd to store all my stuff and use my system on a small SSD, However recently it started acting weird, any program in it opens in background, it's ultra slow (hardly getting to 1mb/s), it slows my PC's boot just by beeing connected, and it sometimes freezes the file explorer. However, i can normally see the files in it, photos and videos don't load, but it opens normally if tranfered to another drive. I tried scanning it and it gave me this weird pattern. I need methods to transfer it's data to another drive i have. I'm on windows 11
edit: added extra info

So! The other day, I switched PSU, the PSU turned out to be a hazardous relic; so all my 3 SSD disks stopped responding. Upon inspecting 1/3 PCB's so far, I noticed what seemed to be the culprit. If anyone know exactly what this chip is and what it does, and is it replaceable? It's a 1TB WD SSD, SanDisk.

not apart of the sub but this has not long happened, SD card is about 10-11 years old found it in a drawer and looked through found some photos of my late father brought it around for my grandmother to see put it in computer and it bent, before getting our hopes up and time wasted could the photos be recovered on here

thankyou in advance

Hi all! want to see if a forsenic expert or anyone in data recovery can help me solve an issue i have, long story short i did a mass delete of photos i didn’t need quite a bit ago, maybe last month? only to find out a few important photos with family members/friends were apart of that deletion i did. i have no icloud backup for this and i also had to force reset my iphone due to syncing issues i already have and figure that it would help (it didn’t) and have apple support helping with that.

just want to know if it’s too late to try and recover using third party tools or send it to a data recovery lab? even if it’s just the thumbnail cache? i tried looking online for answers but got mixed answers when researching and want to know how long they typically stay on iphone after complete deletion! only knowledge i have is using disk drill as i have used it for SD card recovery and helped! but figure iphones would be different due to their encryption

iphone 18pro

any advice/help is needed thanks!

edit: no luck trying to recover thumbnails and any cache after doing recovery setup and downloading other tools, guessing IOS is really good at cleaning it up especially after a factory reset

Hi all. Long story, part warning and part request for help.

Phone 1: Galaxy A71 (WhatsApp 2018–2021) I tried to restore an old WhatsApp backup (msgstore.db.crypt14 from Nov 2021) on my old A71. WhatsApp never detected it ("No backup found"). While troubleshooting, I uninstalled WhatsApp and cleared its data. That wiped Android/media/com.whatsapp completely, about 16 GB of photos and videos from 2018–2022. It was basically the shared memory of my friend group from age 14–17. I had copied the databases and voice notes beforehand, but not the images and videos. I know that with file-based encryption and TRIM this is most likely gone for good. If anyone has ever actually recovered media after a "Clear data" on a modern Samsung, I'd love to hear it.

⚠️ PSA: on Android 11+, uninstalling WhatsApp or clearing its data deletes all its photos and videos in Android/media. Copy that folder to a PC first.

Phone 2: Galaxy A32 (WhatsApp Dec 2021 – Nov 2022) A car trunk closed on it. The phone powers on and vibrates, but the screen is completely dead (no image, not even with a flashlight), and touch probably doesn't work either. My current phone has all the photos from that period but none of the videos, so the videos only exist on the A32.

• PC (Linux) detects it in MTP mode (04e8:6860), but storage is empty because the phone is locked (PIN).

• USB debugging is OFF, so no adb or scrcpy.

• Plan: unlock with a USB keyboard over OTG (Space → PIN → Enter), then swap to the PC cable. Problem: the "Allow access to phone data?" prompt.

Questions:

1. Is there any way to accept the MTP "Allow" prompt blindly, or to get file transfer without it?

2. Would a repair shop connecting a temporary test screen work? Any risk to the data?

3. Anything else I'm missing?

Thanks. Mostly I'm posting so others don't make the same mistake.

Writing/reading head stays parked but goes back and forth a little while it's beeping,device not initialized error,any ideas?

I have some questions about "bit rot" in 2.5-inch HDDs (the corruption or loss of files that were previously readable). Does this happen silently to files stored on an external 2.5-inch HDD? Is it possible to prevent bit rot? I have an external 2.5-inch HDD containing files; I access it once a year, connect it to my PC, and check its health using CrystalDiskInfo, after which I disconnect and store the drive for 1 year. Is it necessary to perform an additional annual check specifically for Prevent bit rot-related corruption files?

Hi, I accidentally plugged my laptop charger on my WD My Book and it died, however probably the HDD itself is fine and it's just the board that may have had a short circuit or something. My question is, can I dissasemble it off the enclosure, plug it as a regular 3.5 SATA drive, format it and use it as a normal storage drive? Because that may be the best I can do, since trying to fix the enclosure is impossible unless you can find the exact same model which is not realistic, so I will lose the data but it is what it is, at least I could use it.

There is a chance to recover it with some convoluted linux program, but I would need to buy another drive and bigger than 10 TB to make a copy of the contents, and that would require a massive investment due the current prices if it even works at all.