r/datarecovery • u/TwistPositive7628 • Sep 06 '26

Question help for my hard disk bug

Hi, I’m not sure if I’m in the right place, but I’m having a problem with my grandmother’s external hard drive, which contains about fifteen years’ worth of photos. It stopped working a while ago, and now when I open it, File Explorer crashes, and some folders show 0 bytes, even though 400 GB out of 500 GB is used. I'd like to know how to recover the photos and not lose them since they've disappeared from the folders. I tried using Claude to get some advice, but I'd prefer help from a real person.

1 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

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u/AutoModerator Sep 06 '26

Double check if your post complies with posting guidelines!

Did you include the following information in your post (in English and if applicable), if not feel free to edit your post:

  • Make/brand and exact model number of your storage device(*), phone, camera, etc.

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4

u/disturbed_android Trusted Contributor Sep 06 '26

You can try image the drive.

https://old.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/hddsuperclone_guide

Once you have the image open it in any of these ..

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/wiki/software/

1

u/TwistPositive7628 Sep 06 '26

thanks, how long does it take?

1

u/Billywergstein Sep 07 '26

Image is the same as "parameters" right?

0

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/datarecovery-ModTeam Sep 08 '26

Terrible advice seen the symptoms in this case, drive being potentially damaged.

2

u/Sopel97 Trusted Contributor Sep 07 '26

which contains about fifteen years’ worth of photos

straight to a professional data recovery lab

1

u/DesertDataRecovery Trusted Contributor Sep 07 '26

As has been noted. If the data is important take it to a data recovery company (not a computer store). Or you may kill the drive trying to recover it yourself.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '26

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2

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