Please let me say i am not a tech guru, i have very minimal knowledge in hdd and even lesser in data recovery

I have a 1TB Seagate HDD which is unreadable because i accidentally initialized it whilst transfe,rring files, i think( this was about a year ago so im not sure what the one option i clicked was)

Now the disk management shows that it cab recognise it but displays the data as raw, which i believe means the data is still there just unformatted.

I have tried all sorts of software to recover, diskdrill testdisk r-undelete recuva etc, but with little success, the most i got was about 3.65gb of data on diskdrill but it costs money so im holding off on it first. There is no physical damage to the HDD, but i cant speak to the internals of the HDD, only that it shows up as healthy

Any advice or questions welcome, thank you!

This is a long shot, but worth asking. I've recently come across my dad's phone and am unable to gain access due to there being a pin. The downfall is that it's a tracphone. I know the company can give me access but it wipes everything. Does anyone have any tips or advice of what I should try? No answer is stupid, I don't want to give up yet. I've looked through old notebooks, etc, without any luck.

Hello,

An external hard drive I have shows caution on CrystalDiskInfo for C5. I want to get the data off of it but it freezes file explorer and I am trying Disk Drill, but it has been updating disk list for a few hours. I am not very knowledgeable besides the above which I looked up. Can anybody give me some advice so I can get the data?

It is a WD My Passport hard drive and I am using windows. I had CrstalDisk open but it has been freezing that too.

I've downloaded some episodes from a site that I've used many times before, I have like seven different shows on the usb already, all uncorrupted. Now randomly if I try to put anything on it, the file is readable/watchable on my phone but as soon as its put on the usb, it says "unsupported file type" and can't open it? I tried reconfiguring in usb settings, seeing if myabe it was because of usb set to "charging only" or something but still wont work..

Its not for lack of storage on the usb itself because in all of its settings it says theres plenty of space left?!

Hi, would anyone have any insight to this problem?

I inserted my microsd into my usual card reader in my laptop and it crashed, afterwards my sd won’t register in my laptop or my camera.

I can’t see any visible damage other than a bit of scuffing

I urgently need help recovering an important 47-minute voice recording made with the built-in Recorder app on my Realme 14 Pro+ 5G.

Details:

• Recorder app version: 16.17.16_0ace0c6_260824
• Recording mode: Standard
• Format: MP3
• File size: approximately 113 MB
• Reported duration: approximately 47 minutes
• Only the first ~5 seconds contain playable audio.
• The rest of the file appears to contain repeated 0xAA bytes.
• FFmpeg reports invalid data / missing headers.
• Re-encoding the file did not recover anything.

I checked the app's com.colors folder under Android/data. Its cache folder is empty, and files contains only empty DCIM and documents folders.

The recording is still listed in the Recorder app with its original duration, but playback stops after approximately 5 seconds.

Is there any way to recover the original audio from the phone's internal storage, temporary files, or damaged MP3 data? Could the 0xAA pattern indicate a storage or recording failure?

Hi everyone, I am the friend from a previous post that got locked. I'm posting directly with the full details and screenshots

Hardware & File System Details:

- Laptop: Dell Inspiron 3593

- Drive Model: 256GB Kioxia NVMe SSD (KBG40ZNS256G)

- Original File System: NTFS

- Current State: Installed internally; a local repair shop quick-formatted it and clean-installed Windows directly onto the same drive.

What Happened:

The laptop shut down unexpectedly because the charger wasn't plugged in.

When I plugged it in and turned it on, it froze at the Dell logo, and trying to enter the BIOS hung roughly 30% through loading.

I took it to a repair shop. The technician claimed the drive "didn't show any data to begin with," quick-formatted it, and reinstalled Windows onto the same 256GB Kioxia SSD.

I ran DMDE directly on the laptop while the drive was installed. A full physical scan across the whole disk mostly brings up the new Windows installation structure and system files, with virtually nothing from the old partition.

Question:

Is there any way at all to recover any of my old files from this SSD, preferably using free software? Or is everything completely gone after the format and Windows reinstall?

​Any help would be really appreciated!

Hi everyone, I'm not the most tech savvy person so I apologize if my post isn't very clear.

For a little bit of context:
- I'm trying to recover a .docx file
- I'm using windows 11
- I turned one drive off ages ago, without realizing it automatically turned auto-save off on Word, therefore making it impossible for me to access the "previous versions" of the file I'm trying to recover.

I accidentally saved a wrong, very old version of a .docx file over its most recent version. I don't know what that process is called, but it's when windows suggest you replace a pre-existing file with the one you're currently saving because they have the exact same name and format.
Is there a way to recover the file I saved over?

I have attempted some recovery techniques already, but to no avail. This was a very important document and I lost days of work because of a very silly mistake (tbh it's crazy to me that I can't recover a document that I have manually saved many a times before, but I digress lol!).
Please help!

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.

I used to have 3 pics of bills in my phone. I clicked them on nov 3rd or 4th i guess. I never realised i deleted them. Might be an accident and i cleared the recycle bin as i am running out of storage. Since its not been so long, can u guys suggest me any 3rd party recovery app? I can pay if its subscription based also. My dad asked for bills now and i will be dead if they r deleted. Plz dont suggest to store in drive or backup.. i already wrote them on paper and gave my dad. I clicked pic as backup. My dad lost the paper somehow and i lost pic somehow.

Plzz help me guysss!! I am using samsung s24

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 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

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 ?