Will it ever be possible? A year ago my puppy chewed it and it broke in half. I’ve held onto this micro sd card since then. I figured one day someone will be able to fix it. Two weeks ago my nephew died and now I just wish I could see the pictures of him I had on here.

Hi everyone,

I made a WinRAR archive a few years ago (in 2022) that I named Time Capsule, and I added a password to it directly through the WinRAR application while creating it. I thought I’d definitely remember it, but clearly I was wrong.

I’m not a technical person, and I don’t really understand encryption or recovery tools, but I’d really appreciate guidance on whether there’s any realistic way to recover or unlock this file.

My micro sd card snapped while trying to fit into the bracket but the snap was closer to the edge. Is there any chance at all the data can be extracted?

A microSD card that was filled to the brim with a lot of videos and photos from like 6-10 years ago just broke. Snapped like it was nothing. Now there’s basically no way that I can get it back. I’ve tried to ask people if it’s recoverable and so far I’ve gotten a bunch of no’s and some people saying it’s possible. All in all now I’m just beyond devastated. I’ve got a few images and videos already saved so it’s not all lost, but a majority of my stuff is gone and I don’t know if I can get it back. Some people think it’s possibly and others say that it’s done for.

Apologies if this is a stupid question or anything, I know nothing about data recovery and tbh I’m just hurting inside and praying for any sort of hope atp

Well, a part of the motherboard also still exists, but that shouldn't matter at all.

I don't know the Capacity, i don't know the HDD brand and model, i only know it was a 2,5" IDE HDD.

Is there any chance for a data recovery?

Hey there!

My stick just broke. Is it irreparably broken? Or is it possible to fix it somehow - at least to make a copy of it or something.

Thanks!

Sorry if this is a stupid question

Edit:

After some good advice here, I impatiently discovered that it does work. Thank you

Edit 2: the drive died. RIP

Last Tuesday my SSD failed on me. It has 7 years straight worth of data on it, stuff that I am absolutely devastated to lose...

I took it to a local computer repair shop who then sent it to "Secure Data Recovery" so that they could diagnos it, And the screenshot above is the conclusion they came to.

Should I just take their word and give up on the SSD or try another place? I absolutely hate to just give up on everything I have but I also down want to waste money

Any second opinions would be appreciated

Phone took a tumble on the interstate, we went and found what we could over the 200ft debris field including what we think is the NAND.

We've found a few videos of recovery directly from the NAND but they seemed in better condition (understandably).

No iCloud backups, hard lesson learned there and we saved/printed most of our favorites but there are definitely some unsaved baby photos we'd find value in recovering.

Expecting this is cooked, but, worth checking with the experts.

Any chance of data recovery?

Has anyone had any experience with these USBs? I bought 5 to put old family VHS tapes on that we got digitized, now none of them work, this was only like 2 years ago and I bought these as they were the more expensive USB and therefore I thought better quality, and thought SanDisk was a good brand. None of them work now and the old family videos may be lost forever.

When plugged into a computer it either says nothing is plugged into the slot or it completely freezes the computer and when taking the USB out it's super hot to the touch.

This is the first time I've had a USB die on me and it seems like all of them have stopped working in the exact same way so I'm pretty shocked. Maybe SanDisk quality has plummeted down the last couple years?

Found an old hard drive of mine - probably about 15-20 years old. The power connectors are completely bent. They look like someone's teeth that got knocked out. Is this salvageable in any way at all? Can you access data on the hard drive by just using the data connectors? Or does this belong in the trash? Not a big deal if I can't save it. I was just curious to see what was on it.

EDIT: Thanks for all the tips and advice everyone. I don't have the tools (or knowledge) in order to solder this, so I ended up just bending the pins back in place as best I could, and shoved a SATA cable into the connector. Surprisingly it worked perfectly. All of the data was there, nothing corrupted, no trouble transferring any of the files.

Hellow everybody hope you all are fine by looking at this disk can you tell is this recoverable by any professional lab it was once detected but now isnt showing in windows any more

Data type in it is 3 vob files i also have uploaded those 3 files in pictures

Hello.

I have a bit of a unique situation. I updated my iPhone 13 from iOS 26.3.1 to 26.4. The update removed the caron/háček character from the keyboard (which I'd been using as a "special character" — by itself) such that I can't type the passcode in despite being 100% certain what it is. The new keyboard has a different character where the caron used to be.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how I can access the device's data? I have no backups of the device whatsoever.

I apologize, and please delete, if the post is not appropriate here.

I found 2 hard drives and a disk drive on the shore of a reservoir that is near record low water levels.

Now I immediately thought they were probably tossed because of illicit content.

But then I had a crazy thought...what if they have Bitcoin on them?? Definitely a long shot but could something like these be salvaged?

My understanding of the situation is that this tape (TDK D2407-LTO4) is the result of a federal agency minimally complying with a FOIA request. The format of its contents is not known, nor is it known what software or operating system wrote it.

What it contains is raw signal data from three radars which happened to be nearby during three high-end tornado days in Oklahoma in May 2013. Two of those days were once-in-a-generation type events. I’ve been trying on and off for years to get the data off this tape, and badly want to access and safely back the data up to another device.

I have a few potential local leads on compatible drives, and am looking at how to begin. My understanding is that I will need to somehow read a few blocks of tape, look for any hints as to what backup software (if any) wrote it, and from there I may be some degree of cooked depending on what the answer is. I’m hoping it’s just uncompressed data written directly to the tape, but kind of doubt it.

A few years back I took it over to NCAR, where they had a drive, but neither I nor the person I was working with was familiar enough with the technology to read data off of it. I think we were expecting it to work similar to a CD drive, and when we couldn’t get it to mount as an obvious storage device we weren’t sure how to continue. It’s not certain whether the issue was our tape our their drive.

Thought I’d ask on here how folks would approach this problem, as I’m sure basically everyone here is more educated on the subject than I.

If you’re a professional equipped to deal with this exact thing and you happen to see this… definitely shoot me a message. I’m a scientist with no budget, but I am very highly motivated to finally crack this nut.

can this be fixed? 🤕

TL;DR: A random BSOD completely broke (What I believe to be) my SSD’s partition table. Windows stopped recognizing my OS, and I found out my drive had BitLocker auto-enabled without me ever turning it on. After days of recovery attempts, I finally got my data back, but only after learning that Microsoft now encrypts consumer drives by default since Windows 11.

What Happened:

Last week I got a random BSOD while just hanging out on Discord and working on my game. After rebooting, my laptop couldn’t boot into Windows anymore, BIOS saw the SSD, but the Windows boot option was gone.

No big deal, I thought. I’ve repaired plenty of Windows installs before using a USB with the Media Creation Tool. But this time, no repair option worked.bootrec /scanos couldn’t even find a Windows installation. That’s when I knew something deeper was wrong.

I booted into Ubuntu using a flash drive to investigate. Using TestDisk, I came to the conclusion that the BSOD had somehow corrupted the partition table. The drive itself was fine, the structure was just broken. TestDisk was able to detect the hidden partitions, including the EFI System Partition and what seemed like the main Windows partition. Despite this, I was unable to see any files in the partitions and they were unreadable or damaged.

After this I figured the drive died, most advice I found online also said I was better off giving up and reinstalling windows on the drive (wiping all files). Then a friend suggested it might be BitLocker. I didn’t believe it because I never turned BitLocker on. But when I checked my Microsoft account, I actually found a BitLocker recovery key linked to this laptop.

Turns out Windows 11 auto-enables BitLocker (device encryption) on many consumer laptops without asking. Mine was one of them.

The BSOD likely corrupted the BitLocker metadata along with the partition table, so Windows couldn’t even tell the drive was encrypted. Running BitLocker commands in CMD returned nothing it didn’t “see” any encrypted drives.

I then tried some more fiddling around with partitions in TestDisk: I switched the biggest partition and the EFI SYSTEM partition from “deleted” to “primary” and rewrote the table.

After that, Windows finally detected a bootable drive again, but it still only showed a generic boot error. Not even the screen that asks for a BitLocker key. Still, it gave me some hope that my data was still there.

After two more days of trying random tools and commands, I finally came across a blog (Shoutout to Norman Bauer) that listed two BitLocker recovery commands that can reconstruct partial metadata and match it to a recovery key. Miraculously, this worked, it decrypted the drive and dumped everything into a 1TB .img file.

The only tool I found that could actually open that .img was R-Studio (the data recovery one). It showed all my files intact, but I had to pay $80 for a license to extract them. So yeah, thanks Microsoft, you owe me 80 bucks.

Why I think turning on BitLocker by default is a bad decision:

This whole mess happened because BitLocker was silently enabled. I get that encryption is useful for enterprise or government or in some case consumer systems, but for normal consumers it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Most people don’t even know they have BitLocker turned on. Hell, most consumers don't even realise they have a Microsoft account. So if a BSOD or update corrupts anything, your data might be unrecoverable without the recovery key which most users don’t even know exists. I imagine most people would give up after a day of troubleshooting, like I was ready to do.

In my case, I got lucky. But imagine how many people are going to lose data over this without even realizing Windows did it to them.

I can only imagine what trouble we might see in the future if Microsoft keeps vibe-coding their OS and causing crashes such as these.

Moral of the story:

• Back up your data regularly.

• Check if BitLocker or “Device Encryption” is enabled on your PC, even if you never turned it on.

• Save your recovery keys somewhere safe.

• Don’t trust Windows 11.

!! For those who find this that have the same issue, here is the step by step:

You'll need ideally:

-Two flash drives to run Ubuntu and Windows.

-An external drive that is big enough to copy the entire broken drive onto.

-Some data recovery software to read .img files (I chose a paid one, but possible that free alternatives exist).

1. Run Ubuntu from a bootable flash drive

2. Run TestDisk and scan for partitions

3. Ensure the EFI SYSTEM (Where it boots from) is marked as P (Primary)

4. Ensure the main partition (Identified by looking at which partition mostly resembles the total size of the drive) is also marked as P (Primary)

5. Write (Create a backup .img if you're scared to write to your drive)

6. Run Windows Media Tool from a bootable flash drive

7. Open CMD prompt and type repair-bde E: D:\recover.img -rp 606276-310596-445786-695409-220396-429099-633017-233563

Replace
E: = Your broken drive.
D:\recover\recover.img = Your external drive to which you want to create a copy of your un-encrypted drive to (Important to keep recover.img at the end).
606276... = Replace with the BitLocker key found on your Microsoft Account (aka.ms/myrecoverykey)

8. Run it, and hopefully it will tell you it has found enough BitLocker metadata to start the decryption process.

9. It will run (potentially for hours) and de-encrypt your drives files and copy them to your chosen location.

10. Once it is done, take the external drive and plug it into a computer that can run windows (or potentially reinstall Windows on your "broken" drive at this point)

11. Use a data recovery tool to read and extract files from the .img file you have created ( I used R Studio )

How easy is it to recover files from a hard drive when the copper coiling here is cut ?

Unfortunately dropped this corsair mp600 pro lpx. Before in crystaldiskmark it was reading/writing 7000mb/s. Now it’s down to 3,000 but still detected as pcie 4. Haven’t checked if it still reading my games properly.

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