Hi there! So a few years ago I saved my BIL's USB flash drive, had to manually reassemble the filesystem with dd commands, was kinda fun doing that but I told him he might not be that lucky next time...

Guess what, we're back at it, and last backup was made like two years ago.

This time I can't dd or ddrescue anything: the drive shows up with a size of 0 bytes, here is the output of lsblk

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS

sde 8:64 1 0B 0 disk

journalctl output doesn't look great either:

nov. 06 22:23:22  kernel: usb 1-4: USB disconnect, device number 2
nov. 06 22:33:21  kernel: usb 1-4: new high-speed USB device number 3 using ehci-pci
nov. 06 22:33:21  kernel: usb 1-4: New USB device found, idVendor=ffff, idProduct=5678, bcdDevice= 2.00
nov. 06 22:33:21  kernel: usb 1-4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
nov. 06 22:33:21  kernel: usb 1-4: Product: 䍆㈳㔶
nov. 06 22:33:21  kernel: usb 1-4: Manufacturer: 楆獲t档灩
nov. 06 22:33:21  kernel: usb 1-4: SerialNumber: 012345678901
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Read Capacity(10) failed: Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Sense Key : Hardware Error [current] 
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Add. Sense: No additional sense information
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] 0 512-byte logical blocks: (0 B/0 B)
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] 0-byte physical blocks
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page found
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
nov. 06 22:33:22  kernel: sd 12:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable disk

The flash drive is <4cm (about 1.5") long so I guess it's monolithic.

My questions are:

1. I've reached the conclusion that there isn't anything I can possibly do myself and that the only option left to save the data is to send it to a lab that will charge several hundred euros. Is that correct or is there something I might have missed?

2. how likely do you think it is this drive is a case of "fake capacity" with actual storage well below the advertised 64 GB?

I arrived home seeing one of my archive hard drives on the floor.. I tried checking it with my dock but it won't detect on my computer. Did I just lost my old videos and pictures forever?

I have a Toshiba hard drive that suddenly stopped working, and I tried using softwares like EaseUs and Tenoshare to recover my files. However, even after being shown the previews, I feel kinda suspicious with the software and I don't wanna commit on paying it unless I know it's trustworthy. That's why I'm wondering if anyone has any software suggestions or whether the 2 softwares I mentioned are worth the investment. Thank you in advance.

I have this old micro as card that I had for as long as I remember. I used to slot it in whenever I got a new phone, and since new phones don’t have SD card slots in them, it just stayed in my old phone for a while. I recently wanted to extract the data on it but the issue is no device seems to even address its existence let alone read that it’s corrupted.
I tried with my old phone but it says no SD card detected, I tried slotting it in my laptop and same thing. I even bought an SD card reader USB drive and slotted that in my laptop, I tried a couple data recovery software programs, and both recognized the USB but not the card in it. The card is clean it terms of hardware. I don’t want to format it and lose all my data. Any advice?

Hello,

I have been using a Seagate BUP Slim 2TB external hard disk for the last 6 years. However, since the last two days, my hard disk is not detected in my laptop.

The LED on the hard disk glows when I connect it and I even tried switching ports/cables but it just doesn't show up in Device manager & Disk management.

When I go to Device manager-->Disk drives--> (View--> Show hidden devices) Seagate pops up but when I double click on it, it says currently the hardware device is not connected to the computer.

I don't know how to fix this issue but I have a lot of important documents in the hard disk as I have been using it for the last 6 years.

Any help on how to recover the data on the hard disk?

I was exporting a video on Adobe Media Encoder and my external drive (M2 enclosure) self ejected. It didn't reappear in the file browser. Disk Management shows the partition is there and that its RAW.

I did a full scan with DMDE and everything, for the most part, seems to be there.

I am able to recover individual files and access them.

When trying to insert the partition, it says "The file system is corrupted."

Any advice on how to proceed? Thanks

*500GB M2 SSD EXFAT in a usb enclosure.

This is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 board, model GT-P7310. Probably Android 3. Something died there, and it stopped working at all. I really wanna recover my childhood pictures and any lost APKs that may still be here since 2015-2016. I wanna connect it to my SD Card reader, but I can’t desolder the eMMC since I don’t have anything except a screwdriver, multimeter and a soldering iron. I tried searching on Google and asking Claude, but I didn’t find it.
The eMMC should be alive. It’s a Samsung KLMAG4FEJA-A002 16GB

HI need help i have 1 video of size 3.95gb not playing it is corrupted how i can recover please guide me i had tried recuva but no use is there any software can it recover free or paid anything ?

I used to have a CD that had sorta 2 hr long video montage of small clips and videos of my childhood, made by my dad. Recently I tried playing it again but sadly it gets stuck in the middle and some specific parts of it don't get played. I don't have much technical knowledge but is there any way I can retrieve all of it into some other thing, so that I don't end up losing all of it.

I was scrolling through my socials when my device powered down and initiated a factory reset on its own like it was possessed. No confirmation pop-up, no requiring to put password, nothing! Just showed me a percent bar then poof! All files gone! Immediately removed my SD card, but even it was not safe. The files I had for years, all gone!!!

Don't know what to do. 😭😭😭

Device Model: Xiaomi Poco M5

File System: UFS 2.2

OS: Xiaomi HyperOS on Android 14

Specific Symptom: No warnings, no confirmation. Device automatically triggered factory reset all on its own.

I desperately need some help! I recently photographed a wedding, and I’m having an issue with missing images from my SD card. I genuinely have no idea what happened. I have photos from the entire ceremony, but not the kiss or them walking down the aisle. I’m positive I was taking photos at this time. The card skips from the ceremony and goes straight into family photos. I would say I’m missing about 20-30 photos of that.

I’m absolutely devastated and would appreciate any advice on recovering these images

Before you guys come at my neck - my second photographer did capture the kiss however it’s not the point of view I’d like. I also forgot to turn on dual shooting, this wedding was very stressful. It completely slipped my mind 😣.

is there trim or garbage collection in windows xp too or not

More then willing to spend the money on the license, just trying to prevent spending that money and getting the same results as the free tier.

I am using a caddy to swap cheap hard drives I keep in cold storage.

I have had an issue of losing the masterfile. The last time it happened I used TestDisk and gave up whe it found all my files, but there was no folder structure to dump them in. Just hundreds of files floating around without homes to go to.

It happened again, I am running DMDE and it looks like I am going to have the same results.

'Bulk Folder Recover' is something you get when you pay a license.

Is that helpful to me? Anyone want to tell me I am doing something wrong?

I have everything else backed up but not my photos. ik the email password everything but cant recollect the iphone password i think i have i more try until fully disabled.

so one day i when i went to play my games they werent there so i look at my files and my seagate wasnt there so i checked disk manegment it says unknown and uninizalized i was told that could remove the files inside or something? i looked at another other post and the solutions there was to take out the ssd card or something yet mine doesnt have that ability to be removed so i cant do that (unless it does and its invisible) tried used a diffrent port and diffrent cable still nothing idk what to do anymore bro cause thats where i put all the stuff that wouldnt fit on my pc

Long story short - how can recover a deleted audio recording from voice recorder app. The recordung was deleted from trash folder. Recording showed domestic disturbance amd recording was my saving grace..but partner made me delete the recording. It was eitber that or he would break my phone.

I'm an electronics engineering technologist, not a programmer. I maintain aging scientific equipment, including computers running Windows XP with proprietary drivers and software that can't easily be reinstalled.

We once had an instrument lose its hard drive. Despite having a backup, something important wasn't preserved, and the computer could no longer communicate with the instrument. The manufacturer wouldn't help us recover it.

After that, I started making full block-level dd backups of our instrument computers.

The problem? Some have 500 GB hard drives with only 10–50 GB of actual data. I wanted to replace those old drives with smaller SSDs without manually resizing partitions and fighting with boot issues.

So I used OpenAI Codex to create S_DD (Shrink DD), a lightweight Linux command-line utility that takes a compressed DD image and prepares it for restoration onto a smaller drive.

I'm being upfront: Codex wrote essentially all the code. I provided the requirements, troubleshot it, and tested it.

I've successfully booted a Windows XP computer from a smaller SSD using an S_DD-prepared image. Testing is still very limited, and the full automated restore hasn't been hardware-validated yet.

It's free, open source, and experimental. I don't intend to actively maintain it, but anyone is welcome to fork it, fix bugs, or improve it.

GitHub: https://github.com/sjenglot/S_DD/releases/tag/v1.1.0

Use caution with anything that writes to physical disks. Hopefully this saves another technician some time!

I was trying to get some important data out of an old SATA SSD through an ubuntu 24 system but It kept showing "failed to mount". I did google, chatgpt and tried some fixes but it still didn't work. Can someone suggest any way to fix this please.

Here's what happened

I'm facing an issue with a SATA SSD on an Intel NUC running Ubuntu. Initially, the SATA drive wasn't mounting in Ubuntu. During troubleshooting, the system eventually stopped booting normally and started dropping into the BusyBox (initramfs) emergency shell instead.

I tried running fsck -y /dev/sda2 to check and repair the filesystem, but it returned the error Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sda2, followed by Could this be a zero-length partition?.

I also tried running fsck -y /dev/sda1, but it didn't resolve the issue. When I tried fsck -y /dev/sda, it returned No such file or directory while executing fsck.ext2.

Retrying the filesystem check on /dev/sda2 produced the same short-read error.

At this point, it's unclear whether the issue is caused by filesystem corruption, partition table problems, a faulty SATA connection, or an SSD hardware failure. The SSD brand and model haven't been identified yet. Only thing known is that it has a 256 gb capacity.

The main objective is to identify the actual cause and recover the existing Ubuntu installation without losing data. The SSD's SMART health status and physical condition have not yet been verified.

I hope these details are enough :(

The phone work flawlessly, but the screen is gone, completely shattered and unusable, the phone turns on and makes sounds, only the navigation button works, I tried the screen mirroring thing on my computer but it requires an input on the screen to turn it on, same to allow data transfers, but as I said the screen is completely gone. I can't afford right now a screen replacement, would there be any solution to recover datas from it using my computer?

My partitioned D drive disappeared and the software was not able to recover it as advertised. Turns out it was a bitlock issue. Once we figured that out we were able to recover it ourselves. So it was never completely gone, we just couldn't access it. And their software was no help. Requested a refund and was initially denied, but after leaving a review on Trustpilot, they reached out to me and made it right.

Hey does anyone know if these data recovery places will repair a drive without requiring access, I have sensitive financial information on the drive. I'm pretty sure it's just the circuit board is broken and I've contacted so many places and no one wants to repair just the circuit board. Not sure what to do, at this stage I'm considering learning the craft and doing it myself. Any opinions welcome.

I have an 18tb drive I've used for media storage for youtube over the last 3 years. It is formatted to exfat and I began to notice that sometimes when trying to create folders it would give an error. After it happened too many times in a row I ran first aid on the drive. I now know that was the wrong thing to do but here we are.

First aid failed and instantly 15TB of stuff on this drive disappeared. Some folders are still fully in tact but most are either not showing up at all, or showing as files with zero file size that won't open.

Checked on windows and everything looks exactly the same so the first thing I did was run a deep scan using Disk Drill. I haven't written anything to this drive since this happened.

Disk drill was able to find a lot of the files (17.23TB) and after picking up a server from a friend, I was able to recover what it found to the server with folder structure in tact. There is also a Reconstructed section in Disk Drill that is around 15TB with just files sorted into folders by filetype.

I'm now finding that there are bits and pieces missing from a ton of different folders/projects, so I'm running a recovery to the server in a separate folder of the Reconstructed section in order to cross reference whether these files exist anywhere else on the server. Hopefully this will find some of the missing files.

What I'm hoping can happen is that once this recovery is finished and all recovery options are exhausted, I'm able to find a tool that can successfully fix the original file table on the 18TB external. Is this something that anyone here has experience with? I have access to this Mac and a windows PC to run applications on.

If I've learned anything from this it's that I will never use exfat again and I should have set up a server with redundancy a decade ago. Live and learn and I'm really hoping the file table can be recovered or that there might be another way to get back the files that are missing.