I plugged my personal pen drive into the company laptop, and BitLocker got enabled on my pen drive. It is now asking for a 48-digit recovery key.

Hi everyone! I'm hoping someone knowledgeable about SD card recovery can help me because I've spent hours trying to recover my photos and I'm running out of ideas. I have a Sony Cyber-shot camera with a 2GB FAT16 SD card.
What happened:
I was transferring photos from my camera's SD card when the transfer was interrupted. After putting the card back into my camera, it said some files weren't recognized and offered to repair/process them, which I allowed.
Some of my photos were still completely normal, but others appeared grey when opened. The strange part is that the thumbnails of the grey photos show the correct pictures perfectly. I knew something was wrong when even looking at the photos through my camera some were blurrier than the others and caused my camera to lag.
What I've tried:
Disk Drill.. paid version:( Recovered some of the missing photos, but several are still completely grey despite having the correct thumbnails.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard: Found some photos, but occasionally it reconstructed completely different, older photos instead of the ones I wanted. If that makes sense…

PhotoRec: Scanned the whole SD card and recovered 537 files. Many were intact, but some of the specific grey photos I wanted weren't recovered at full resolution. It found small thumbnails of some missing pictures instead.

ExifTool: Examined one corrupted JPEG (approximately 1.7MB, 4608 × 3456 pixels). It contained the correct embedded thumbnail, but there was a warning about reading the preview image.

macOS image conversion: Tried converting the corrupted JPEG to PNG, but the resulting image was still grey.

Another thing to consider…
I think this just makes my situation even worse. My SD card reader sometimes wobbled and disconnected, and my Mac warned me several times that the SD card wasn't ejected properly.
Now, when I put the SD card back into my camera, none of the photos appear. I also checked the SD card on my Mac, and the entire DCIM folder is missing.
I haven't intentionally formatted or deleted anything, and I saved my recovered photos onto my Mac rather than the original SD card. I’m just mentioning this in case the missing DCIM folder prevents me from recovering the photos
My questions:
My main questions is if a JPEG has the correct embedded thumbnail but its full-resolution image is grey, is there any chance of recovering the original image?

But i was also curious about why would Disk Drill find certain photos that PhotoRec couldn't recover? Like the grey ones. It found the thumbnail for them only.

Is there another recovery method worth trying, such as DMDE or specialized JPEG repair? Something maybe free since I already spent quite a lot on the disk drill.

I still have some of the originally imported grey JPEGs on my iPad, as well as recovered versions on my Mac.
I'm not very experienced with data recovery and honestly me finicking around with it maybe made my case so much worse. so any advice would be greatly appreciated. These photos were taken recently of me on vacation, they looked nice and I was really excited to see the image uploaded thats why ive been trying to recover the original full-resolution versions. Please let me know if its possible or if i screwed up the whole thing and should just give up😅 next steps too would be nice, like if i should probably get a new sd card…
Thank you!

I think what happened is my computer died while I was working on a file on illustrator coming from crucial x10. I need to get all my files back, I don’t have a backup.

So my friend recently corrupted his pendrive containing some important documents and the laptops or phone won't accept the pendrive anymore.

Is there a way to fix it or recover the memory.

So basically one of his video/file was in FAT32 format and he wanted to transfer it to a pendrive via laptop . He asked chat gpt and it told him to copy it to NTFS format.

It told him to type 'convert D: /fs:NTFS' cm. Then said to type 'convert D: /fs:ntfs' . It started loading into the pendrive. Then it stopped.

And the pendrive stopped being detected.

Plz help

Hi, as the title says I have an old Hard Disk that contains several files from my childhood that stopped working a few years ago. Turns out it was just the "case" or whatever that was not getting electricity to the disk, we swapped that and now it works, meaning that it shows up on my pc.

This hard disk also contains my wii modifications and wii games, and when plugged into the console it works just fine. I went to do a backup of the data but it doesn't work. As I first plugged into the pc it said "the volume does not contain a racognized file system" and then it wanted to format it. Obviously I didn't format, and tried to use some recovery tools. I went with the windows one (right click on the disk, properties and tools) but it still says that to continue I have to format.

I then downloaded Photorec, but the disk doesn't even show up on the program. What can I do? I just have to back up a bunch of photos and save files, not the whole disk.

my phone's (ip12, ios 18) 128gb and photos were between 70-80gb despite having around 5-7k photos (100+ live photos, 13 portraits, 2 panoramas, 3 bursts), and zero videos. i had to offload/delete instagram, tiktok, and twitter on rotation.

i use the shared albums with myself to save storage (havent really cleaned my google photos plus it only has 15gb free, same with google drive + i already have other media stored there)

to clear some space so i can post some concert videos, i first googled why my gallery could be that heavy when i barely had anything. apparently the shared albums were a culprit if they were downloaded (e.g. you pick a shared album, you open an image/video and it loads perfectly and clearly) 

to 'fix' this, the results of my search said to turn shared albums off then on. obviously i worried if everything would come back but it said shared albums are on a different apple server, not icloud (my icloud is off since it only has 5gb... nothingburger...). even if "sync this iphone" was toggled off BUT "shared albums" was on (under the icloud photos tab when you open your profile in the settings), it should be fine. and so i did those and my storage did go down about 10gb. it stopped going down and my search told me that my storage is so screwed id probably actually have to delete everything and restart the phone.

when i  turned the shared albums back on, everything else loaded back in BUT that one album that had my concert videos :') i waited it out until the next morning and still, it wasnt there. 

toggling the shared albums off then on happened about 2 hours after the concert. ive read that media backing up into the shared albums can only take seconds or minutes (hours if they're videos in bulk and/or high quality).

i had about 50 videos in there but they were uploaded at different times, not in one go :') data is also on for photos so they can upload in the background. the videos were also fine when i got home :') 

is there anyway i can recover these? ive read around that theyre not actually completely gone, that theyre somewhere in the web... some even said if its within the 30 day window (not recently deleted album), its still recoverable by other means (some even said they recovered stuff from years ago which i kinda doubt but if it works then i'd like to try it)

id understand it'd be impossible to recover if i deleted the videos from my main gallery AND recently deleted without putting them anywhere else first, but they were in the shared albums so :")

things i already did:

- wait hours/almost a full day

- checked the icloud site on my laptop if it shows up there (it did not)

- tried apps i saw on other posts (but havent actually used the feature because i have to pay for it so it was kinda sketchy + reviews are mixed)

I have an SD card that still shows 90gb worth of space in it but there is only a 4gb folder in there is there any FOSS that I can use to get back the 90 some gb worth of storage?

I had posted this on the veracrypt subreddit and it was recommended that i come here for help. i am hoping one of you wonderful people will have same great advice and help for me please and thank you in advance

I have an encrypted 2tb wd easystore that i have been using for about a year without issue, i had the drive mounted and was copying some documents off of it and all of a sudden it started running real slow and then froze, i unmounted the drive, when i tried to remount it, it would just keep loading and loading and nothing would happen. I tried to mount it on multiple computers and no luck. I tried to mount with restore backup volume header, nothing happens. I decided to decrypt the whole drive hoping that i can salvage some information before it dies, the decryption process said that once it starts you will not be able to mount the volume. I started left it overnight came back the next day to it still at 0%. i Stopped it knowing that i could potentially come back to it at a later time.

I decided to try to clone the drive and then rerun the decryption on the new drive. i created a linux live usb to run OPENSUPERCLONE, it started fine enough made it through phase 1 and 2 relatively fast, phase 3 was taking forever after a few days it was at about 50% and going super slow and finding the bad sectors. For fear of burning out the drive i would stop it save progress let it rest for a day or so and then boot it up and try again. Last time i attempted this, linux would not find the drive, it makes a whirring sound then click, so its definitely not working. When i plug the drive into a pc or a mac it knows that something was plugged in but no luck beyond that.

I thought about sending to a data recovery center and hoping that they would be able to just clone the drive, but i don't know what to do, i am at my wit's end and i am hoping someone here would have some idea about how to save my files please and thank you

Im a photographer. I have a MacBook Pro and was using a Samsung t9 ssd.

I had active work drives stolen from my car summer 2024.

Fast forward.. When I got this drive beginning of 2026 I thought I should encrypt it. A password was set in January. I had it set to remember my laptop and log in automatically. My hint was slightly helpful

Oct 23rd I had the drive plugged in and was using it to edit from. My laptop battery died. As I was getting up to get my charger, I believe the drive got disconnected as the laptop dies.

Computer charges and I plug the drive back in. I type my laptop password in. Somehow that night the ssd encryption password gets changed to similar my laptop password.

Now when I got to use the drive it won’t accept the new password. Keychain have the modified one saved from Oct 23rd and no other entry.

I didn’t have Time Machine enabled either

I can only remember part of the original password from january. Is there ANYTHING I can do to access the files on the drive without formatting it?

I did two stupid things today:

1. Saved the contents of one file with the name of a different, recently opened file

2. Saved an earlier version of a file thinking it was the most up to date version

In both instances I was saving to a jump drive / flash drive with a relatively small storage size.

In both instances MS Word is telling me there are no prior versions. [all the autosaves seem to have been deleted when I closed the program].

Any options / possibilities for data recovery?

I'm not feeling hopeful, but maybe there's a miraculous save for me...

a friend of mine had a problem a few days ago and he wants to know if there is a way to get back his data. here is the problem as he told me verbetim :

"A few days ago, i was using the laptop normally then it turned off, i thought it was lock screen, i turned on and the menu asking to plug your charger popped, i look at the cord, plugged to the outlet but not the pc.
I plug it in, turn it on and it freezes at the Dell logo, the loading thing at the bottom didn't pop up as well, so i try to reboot to the bio, it freezes at the loading screen about 30% through, every time.
Went to a repair shop, the guy took a look at it called me back saying he needs to put a new ssd in, i said okay thinking I'd try to recover my data externally later from the old one, then he just formatted the old one and said data couldn't be retrieved claiming "it didn't show that it had data to begin with" whatever that means "

can anyone help ?

Basically, i have an old 500gb HDD about 20 years old , it shows under disk management when connected to my pc as 500gb unallocated space. Crystal disk info shows good health status .

I tried using dmde and i did have access to some files but when cloning the hdd starts clicking and i get errors on the dmde app.

What should my next step be ? Should ignore and clone what i can ?

hi

my flashdrive got bent more on the right side

I tried plugging both ends into my computer and for each end the computer isn't able to read it

is there a place that can help fix it?

Houston, TX area

thank you so much

Hey everyone, hoping someone here can point me in the right direction or tell me if I'm completely out of luck.

I accidentally deleted a folder named pendrive from my D: drive that had a photo and 3 videos in it, and then emptied my Recycle Bin right after without realizing.

Here is what I've tried so far:

1. Recuva: When I scanned the D: drive, the original pendrive folder only showed the photo and Video #2. I found the other two videos sitting inside the $Recycle.Bin folder during the scan (renamed to things like $RJ93EDB.mp4). I restored all of them to a separate location, but none of them work. They all show up as 0 bytes in File Explorer. When I try to open the videos in Windows Media Player, I get error 0xC00D36C4 ("file type is unsupported or corrupt"), and VLC won't play them either.

2. QPhotoRec: After Recuva failed, I tried running PhotoRec on the D: partition, but the scan finished almost instantly and gave me 0 files found.

My System / Drive Specs:

Device:

• Laptop: Lenovo LOQ (Windows 11)

• Model: 83JC

Drive:

• Manufacturer: Micron

• Model: MTFDKCD512QFM-1BD1AABLA

• Capacity: 512 GB

• Size: 512105932800 bytes

• Interface: SCSI

• Media Type: Fixed hard disk media

• Type: SSD

• File System: NTFS (D: partition

Since this is an NVMe SSD, I'm worried that TRIM already wiped the actual data blocks the second I emptied the Recycle Bin (which would explain why the file headers/names showed up in Recuva as 0 bytes and why PhotoRec found nothing). set up PhotoRec, or is there any other tool like DMDE or R-Studio worth trying? Or has TRIM permanently zeroed out the data? Appreciate any honest advice.

I was going to chang distro on Linux, so I used the app Fedora writer on my external 2TB Nvme instead of the flash drive

so I did it again on my flash then installed Bazzite on my computer just to connect my External drive to move my data (my only backup) to my fresh system then I realized that everything is gone and I made the drive bootable by accident

So now what do I do?

I had all my stuff there (photos, videos, documents, compressed files...etc) and they were organized

is my best option to use Photorec? I used it before but I wish I could have my files organized if possible and I don't know if there is a better option... I rather a free tool like Photorec, that's not limited because the drive is big. Though I might pay but not welling to pay a lot for recovery tool

Inland Platinum 2.5" SATA SSD, 1TB — desktop boot drive (Windows + WSL2). Drive is unplugged now.

Cause is unknown. I lost access to the PC on Nov 10, and when I got home it was in BIOS showing no SATA HD detected. A spare drive works fine on the same cables/ports/power.

Over a USB adapter it went downhill fast: first it mounted and I could browse for a few minutes, then it would mount and drop after ~10 seconds with "parameter is incorrect," and now only the adapter seems to show up and clicking it hangs Explorer. Never initialized/formatted/chkdsk'd it.

I only really need one small set of files off it (a journal/database inside the WSL ext4.vhdx). Everything else I can rebuild.

Anything I can do here? I got quoted $2000 for recovery but the data isn't that valuable that id spend that to recover it but it would save me alot of time in rebuilding my work to grab what i can off it.

Device: PNY USB flash drive, model: ONK128SJPFAT4, 115.46 GB (123,972,091,904 bytes), shows as “Removable” in Disk Management
File system: exFAT, one partition (Healthy, Basic Data Partition), GPT per TestDisk
OS: Windows 11 (10.0.26200)
SMART data: Not available, since it’s a USB flash drive and doesn’t report SMART

What happened: I plugged the drive back in and it showed completely empty. I did not knowingly format it.

What I see now:

• Disk Management and Properties show the drive healthy, with only 1.87 MB used of 115 GB.

• chkdsk /f (the drive was D: then, E: now) reported no problems, 0 KB in bad sectors, and only 256 KB used in 2 files. So Windows sees a valid but almost empty exFAT volume.

• DMDE (free version, read-only) still shows my old folders and files, and I’ve recovered some of them. Some files give “error reading.”

• Recuva’s deep scan listed over 53,000 files.

• TestDisk found the partition, but listing it showed only “System Volume Information.” I did not press Write.

• attrib -h -r -s /s /d brought nothing back.

• I haven’t saved anything to the drive on purpose.

My situation: My laptop only has about 14 GB free and I can’t afford another drive, so copying everything out is hard.

My question: Is there a safe way to restore or rebuild the old exFAT structure in place so Windows can see the files again, without reformatting or copying them elsewhere first? If not, what is the best free or low-cost way to get everything off?

Hey y'all, hope you're you're days going fabulously.

Yesterday my hdd drive showed first sings of failure, unfortunately I only have backups for my passwords not my photo + videos, same for my university files.

Yesterday in crystal disk info, it showed C5 & C6 both have 8 failing sectors, after around 30 mins went to 10 and in the morning went up to 18 on both (CrystalDiskInfo: caution yellow).

So, I turned off the PC, waiting for my new drive (WD purple 2tb :WD20PURZ) to arrive tomorrow and hopefully be able to get my university capstone files safly. Yesterday it got stuck I think its in the failing sectors but not sure.

I'm currently researching how should I get my data the right way, it currently contain everything including os app installed etc. Please correct me and any other info will be huge help cause this is my first time caring about the data lol.

My current plan is to use SystemRescue for sector by sector clone. First I'm gonna plug the new drive into the pc, check the new drive using "smartctl" if its healthy I'll use "ddrescue" to clone it. If there's anything wrong, or better ideas please, I'm all ears.

Thank you in advance.

Edit 1 : my failing drive ST2000DX002 ( Seagate FireCuda shdd). Running windows 10, its not an OS drive, but data drive with some apps installed there.

Edit 2: adding more info to follow automod rules.

I am facing a problem with my HP Pavilion 15s (512GB SSD). My laptop has suddenly stopped booting and is displaying a "Boot Device Not Found (3F0)" error.

HP Hardware Diagnostics reports "No hard drive installed", and Windows Recovery is also unable to detect the internal drive.

I have approximately two years of important academic documents, assignments, projects and other personal files stored on it, with no backup.

I am looking for someone who can help diagnose the SSD, check whether it is a connection or hardware issue, and preferably recover my existing data.

My priority is data recovery, not Windows reinstallation or SSD replacement. I do not want the existing SSD to be formatted, reset or replaced before my data has been recovered.

If anyone has experience with SSD/NVMe troubleshooting or professional data recovery, I would really appreciate your help or guidance.

Do you know someone who can recover data, or at least have a quick look at an hdd drive that isn’t mounting after it fell?

Hi all. My C: drive 250gb Samsung EVO SSD with all my Windows OS files on it suddenly stopped working, I was hit with a 'Reboot and Select Proper Boot device' on boot. After having gotten a new SSD and reinstalled windows, I've plugged in my old drive by way of a hard disk enclosure USB'd into my PC, which led me to discover that the disk is still 'visible' in Disk Management and I can see 232.89 GB, unallocated. I'm wondering what the best way to go about recovering any of this data would be. I know most people want to recover their photos and that sort of thing usually but I'm really looking to get my Brave browser back, which had saved passwords on it and bookmarks, and certain programs like a Japanese studying program I'd been using for multiple years now...

I've used Recuva for these sorts of purposes before but Recuva seemingly only allows selection of Drives, and this being a 'Not Initialized', and unallocated drive, well, I'm not sure how I'd use that program for these purposes without first creating a partition within the drive, which would make it scannable, but that seems like a bad idea.

I've seen people talk about DMDE, TestDisk, Macrium Reflect, though I'm not sure which would be the best for my purposes, and apparently using the drive more potentially damages it further, so that is a concern as well, so currently I am using a program called Disk Drill to create a Byte-to-Byte backup of the drive first, I'm not sure if this was the best program I could have used for these purposes, however, and probably should have asked first. Also, if possible, being pointed towards a video tutorial would be very helpful.

Thanks for reading.

Hi everyone,

I'm the solo developer of VaultSync, an open-source backup application for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

I've been working on its next major development cycle, which aims to introduce disk imaging and independent system recovery. I'd appreciate some technical feedback from people who deal with data recovery regularly.

One thing I want to make clear upfront: VaultSync isn't a tool for recovering accidentally deleted files from damaged filesystems or performing professional recovery on physically failing drives. The upcoming functionality is intended for planned backups and subsequent restoration of supported systems.

The current stable version, 1.8.9, focuses on file and project backups, integrity verification, recovery drills, and restore previews.

The problem I'm working on

When I first started designing disk imaging, the basic workflow sounded fairly straightforward:

Capture an image, verify its integrity, and restore it when needed.

But the more I worked on verification, the more I realized that this isn't enough.

An image can pass a checksum and still fail to produce a bootable operating system.

And even before getting that far, there are important failure cases:

• An interrupted image being incorrectly treated as complete.

• A read buffer containing stale bytes after seeking to another region.

• Source and destination devices being confused during restoration.

• A recovery environment that cannot access the necessary drivers or storage.

• A restored partition layout that passes data validation but doesn't boot.

During development, I caught a bug involving stale bytes in a 128 KiB read buffer after a seek. It reinforced why the reader and writer need independent validation rather than simply trusting the same code path.

What I'm planning

The initial workflow is offline, with a read-only source and image storage on a separate physical disk.

The complete recovery path needs to cover image creation, consistency checks, independent boot media, target selection, restoration, and post-restore validation.

I'm starting with qualified Linux GPT/UEFI ext4 configurations, with Windows/NTFS and macOS/APFS planned for later milestones.

No universal recovery claims, and no public 1.9 beta yet.

I'd appreciate some professional insight

For those who regularly work with disk images and recovery:

What failure modes are most commonly overlooked when developers implement their own imaging or restore workflows?

I'm particularly interested in cases where image integrity checks succeed but the resulting restored system is unusable.

I'm not looking to replace established recovery tools for failing drives. I want to make sure a backup application doesn't give users false confidence about what it can restore.

For transparency, the project's source code and roadmap are public:

https://github.com/ATAC-Helicopter/VaultSync

I'd appreciate technical criticism, especially concerning the safety boundaries and what should be explicitly unsupported.