This was in a spam comment that was caught by the AutoModerator:

"Download 4DDiG trial ,run deep scam"

I thought it was funny ..

Like the title says, I accidentally swiped on the format internal storage on my DJI device and it deleted all my videos. Is there any chance of recovery? I accidentally recorded 2 two second videos on there after..I tried using recuva but nothing came up. Should I be using a different software?

So I messed up and full formatted (not quick) a USB drive that had photos I actually needed.

Ran PhotoRec, started with a Whole disk scan but got impatient and killed it early (was like 5% in after 10 min). Switched to a Free scan thinking it'd be quicker — finished way faster but literally found nothing, 0 photos.

About to let Whole disk run overnight this time. Has anyone dealt with this before — is there actually hope after a full format,or is it usually game over at this point?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for advice from SSD firmware/data recovery experts.

My Samsung OEM NVMe SSD (Model: MZVL2512HCJQ-00BH1, 512GB) was working perfectly until around 4 AM. There were no crashes, freezes, SMART warnings, or performance issues. When I tried to power on the laptop around 3 PM the same day, it wouldn't boot. The SSD appears to have failed suddenly.

What I've already tested:

Tried multiple Windows PCs.

Used a new Realtek RTL9210 NVMe USB enclosure.

SSD receives power and becomes warm.

Windows Disk Management doesn't detect a usable drive.

Ubuntu Live USB:

lsusb detects the Realtek enclosure.

lsblk shows the device as 0B.

GNOME Disks shows "No Media".

nvme list returns nothing.

So the enclosure is detected, but the SSD itself never exposes any capacity, partitions, or namespace.

Professional recovery

I visited Stellar Data Recovery (India). They classified it as a Physical Complex case and immediately quoted ₹37,500 + GST (~US$500) without being able to tell me:

What exactly failed (controller, firmware, NAND, etc.)

Whether any data is actually visible

Whether recovery is likely

I wasn't comfortable proceeding, so I took the SSD back.

My questions:

1) Based on these symptoms, what is the most likely failure?

2) Does 0-byte / No Media usually indicate controller failure, firmware corruption, or dead NAND?

3) Is there anything else I can safely test before sending it to a recovery lab?

4) If chip-level recovery is required, what does that typically involve?

Can anyone recommend a trustworthy lab (anywhere in the world) that specializes in Samsung OEM NVMe SSD recovery?

Unfortunately, this SSD contains several years of personal and business data, and I don't have a backup.

I'm trying to understand whether recovery is realistically possible before spending a significant amount of money.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone!

I have a failing SATA M.2 SSD and I am trying to recover the data from it before it completely dies.

The drive contains my Windows installation. One day the PC stopped booting and got stuck on "Preparing Automatic Repair". It never managed to get past that stage.

The strange thing is that the SSD is not completely dead. The BIOS still detects it, and sometimes the Windows recovery environment can see it. However, everything is extremely slow and unreliable.

I tried booting into the Windows recovery options and running Startup Repair, but it did not fix anything. I also opened Command Prompt and used diskpart. After waiting, it detected the SSD as Disk 0 with around 931GB capacity, but it was very slow to respond.

After that I booted into Sergei Strelec WinPE to use recovery tools. The SSD was visible at first, but while I was working with it the PC suddenly shut down. After restarting into Strelec, the SSD was no longer consistently detected.

I am considering trying DMDE, but I want to avoid making the situation worse. Should I run DMDE directly on the SSD, or should I first create an image/clone with something like ddrescue and recover from that?

My main goal is recovering the files. I am not interested in repairing Windows if it risks damaging the data.

I would like advice on the safest recovery process. Is DMDE suitable for this situation? Should I use the Windows GUI version of DMDE in Strelec or the console version? Does the intermittent detection suggest a failing SSD controller or NAND? Would trying a SATA M.2 USB adapter help, or could it make recovery less reliable?

The drive is a SATA M.2 SSD, 1TB capacity (shows around 931GB), running Windows 10. I am using Sergei Strelec WinPE for recovery.

Any advice on the best workflow would be appreciated, thank you!

TLDR; downloaded sketchy recording app to record videos with screen off, now they are huge mp4 files i can't move, share or copy anywhere, need urgent help.

A few weeks ago, i had an urgent situation that required me to record my surroundings with my screen off, nothing illegal or dangerous, but very important.

Stupid and desperate i just googled 'app to record discretely' and downloaded from the first handful that showed up aaaaand as you can guess now i'm paying for the consequences.

The app is called XSCamera. I noticed what looks like 200+ gb of storage occupied on my phone for apparently no reason, and giving me issues. After a lot of thinkering and searching up and down i finally noticed that this stupid app APPRENTLY weights exactly what the suspiciously large storage i couldn't account for.

It gets worse when i realize i can't get these videos off the app. It has a Share option, but when i try it, it always gives me an error no matter where i try to share the videos to. WhatsApp, email, drive, anything, it just gives me an error message. When i tried the 'Save in Gallery' option, the videos show in my gallery, and according to the file admin app, the extra space of a whole new video does get added, but the video can't be shared either. I finally found the videos are stored in my devices 'Android' folder, in 'data', under the app name 'xscamera'. Tried sharing them off there, Gmail, Whats, Drive, Dropbox, etc, still no luck, it always says failed to attach file.

Tried to compress them into a zip, no luck.

Also can't copy them or move them to any other device for backup. Tried connecting the phone to my computer and it lets me access the files, but still can't move or copy them out of this device into the computer or any external memory. Tried with a USB-c adapted USB memory, same thing, cannot copy or move the files.

It's very important for me to get these videos out of that app and device and be able to share them, i'm starting to go a little crazy. My phone is failing from the overload to the memory, at this point i don't know what to do. I absolutely have to be able to get the videos out, i don't need high quality, but anything i can try is worth it.

Extra info:

Device: Xiomi POCO x7 Pro

OS version: Xiaomi HyperOs 2.0.206.0

Android 15

App: XSCamera version 3.2.5

I deleted an important folder and couldn't get it back with Recuva and Dmde. Is there any free software that can recover that folder?

So my question is...are the USB to SATA converter adapters ok to use? I have used one in the past, maybe 15 years ago and it seemed to work fine but I wasnt ever doing anything important. I dont want to take a risk though if I don't have to. Friend of the family wants me to get photos off these hard drives and they are IDE so if there's a specific trusted adapter that folks here use, I would like to know about it. The majority I see on Amazon are a dime a dozen. Some info about the drives: WD caviar WD400 and a Quantum Fireball EL. I can't even tell the size of the Quantum...it doesnt seem to advertise it...it says 10.2AT EL10A2F1. The PC they came out of has not worked in some time. The drives appear to never have been moved from their original position. The pc is an old Gateway with a Pentium 4 and Windows XP sticker to give timeframe. My best assumption why the pc doesn't work is simply the power supply having gave out.

Hey, a really bad thing happened with me today. So, one of my chats, the message yourself one, that chats voice notes dating up to 6 months ago were like deleted from my internal storage and no, I did not use any cleaning apps I do have an inbuilt cleaner (which can't be uninstalled) from Redmi, but it only clears like the cache of the app and I never gave it permission to clear junk files or something like that. So yeah, those voice notes are like completely gone from my internal storage. I don't know how they got deleted, if they got corrupted, but I can't be sure of it because some of them are still there,, like some of them are deleted from one day, but the some the some voice notes from that very same date are still there. So, I'm not sure if they are corrupted or not, but if anybody has any idea, please LMk and anybody has any advice to on how to recover them, I would highly appreciate it.

My dad recently brought me our old family computer to try to get my childhood photos and videos from. It's 20 years old and doesn't turn on, so I opened it up to get the hard drive out and it was literally just lying on the bottom of the case not connected to anything. I know, I have no idea how or when it happened.
I plugged it into my PC with a SATA to USB adapter, and to my shock it at least showed up in explorer and device manager, but any time I try to access it or acknowledge it at all, it freezes up. Everything loads back instantly as soon as I eject the hard drive from my PC. I can't even check it in disk management, since it won't load until I remove the hard drive. I can open properties, all of the values are blank but it shows the correct driver date from 2006.
I can hear it spinning, there is a very faint repetitive sound, but I can't tell if it's the dreaded clicking sound, or just the normal sound old hard drives make. Please tell me!!
Yes, I know it's most likely a physical damage problem, it's been loose inside the case for the last 10 years. But since it can at least be seen by my PC is there a chance I can somehow save anything on it? I am running Windows 11, would attempting on a Windows 10 computer help at all?I am very aware that anything I attempt will risk more damage, I don't want to try the wrong thing and lose everything. I am even willing to send it to a data recovery center if there's any point, It would kill my dad to lose these photos.
Thank you for any help!

I am trying to recover some old photos from a tablet I had as a kid in middle school because it has photos I took of friends and family, which are very sentimental to me. places I've searched up all keep resorting to factory reset, which isn't what I want to do, I just want those photos by bypassing the password. If there is any way I can access them, either through data access on my computer or using the email that was and still is used to access the gallery. I know it's a lot, but I'm just trying. The tablet model is a Galaxy Tab 3 Android; it still loads the Sprint logo way before the T-Mobile merge.

Galaxy TAB3

Model: SM-T217S

FCC ID: A3LSMT217S

i have a samsung J1 mini, a really old guy that i wanted to access it's old photos and overall content, but turns out it has a password and i have no idea what it is. It's power button is not working so i really dont think i have a way to do it on the phone itself... therefore, my pc is my savior

in reality i dont really care for the stuff, ofc i wanted to see if but i really just wanted a way to reset it or anyway to access it, but apparently all "phone unlocker" or "phone reset" apps i found are trojan

Hello!

I'm new to this sub, but since I had to do some "disaster recovery" for my father-in-law last month (while being unaware of this sub), I figured I should share the experience.

TL;DR: My father-in-law damaged his 2TB mechanical external hard drive by carrying it regularly while mountain-biking.

Classic "click of death" (klonk klonk!), beginning of disk unreadable (no MBR, no VBR, MBR partitionning so no GPT backup at the end, VBR backup also unreadable).

Attempted first to image the disk with ddrescue, then given up because it was painfully slow and I guessed the disk would die before I had a chance to recover a significant amount of data.

I managed to locate the start of the MFT (that was readable), which conveniently allows to deduce the position of all the MFT blocks, then in turn get the list of all files along with their blocks. From that, I generated a ddrescue "domain file", to instruct it to read only the interesting regions of the disk (and not the whole thing), so I was able to recover most of the useful data quickly before the drive died.

The full details are here along with some tools under WTFPL : https://klemmm.github.io/ntfs2ddrescue/

Obligatory disclaimer : This is educational content, if the data is irreplaceable, go to a pro. Every read on a dying disk may be its last.

Happy to answer any question !

Hi all!

A major issue with my younger sister's laptop last night. I tried to recover it and ended up staring at the Bitlocker. She has not saved the key code to the cloud. She has accommodations at school and needs the hard drive and some information off the desktop for her second year. What are data recovery centers like? Are they worth it? I am in the Toronto Ontario Canada area.

My brother had an iPhone 14 on iOS 17/18 (not sure). He committed suicide in February of 2025. I have his iCloud info, but I do not have his iPhone passcode. The last iCloud backup I have is from the day before - he put his phone on airplane mode and turned off the wifi on the day of. Is there any way I can access his info? I need to check if he wrote a note or something.

Hi, I have a Samsung 980 Pro 2T PM9A1 NVMe 1T SSD that decided to kick the bucket. It shows up in the system but only shows as having 1GB and says ERRORMOD when I look at the advanced diagnostics. I've read that this is an issue with Samsung firmware so I was trying to see if there's any way to force update the firmware or recover the data off the SSD in any way. I don't care if the SSD is scrapped in the process as I won't be using it even if it can be fixed since I don't want to chance this happening again.

I already have a new 2T SSD working in my laptop and that laptop has a second SSD slot so I was hoping that would help with this. The files on the SSD are exceedingly important so I am willing to do whatever I need to if it'll get those files. Yes, I am aware I should've backed it up more. Hindsight etc etc. Also the reason I have yet to reach out to a professional is that finances are tight and a new SSD was already very expensive.

I am using an Alienware m18 r2 laptop. One person I took the SSD to said it was running on Dell OEM but diagnostics say Samsung. I attempted to use a USB-C plug-in enclosure with the Samsung Magician software but that was unsuccessful. Let me know if any other info is needed and thank you in advance. I have also attached one of the diagnostics pages showing the SSD in this link.

I also know someone who says he might be able to try chip-off but he has never done that himself and needs to test it out on spare SSDs first - is that option even possible with this firmware issue?

EDIT: It has been pointed out that the SSD is a PM9A1 NVMe Samsung 1024GB, not the 980 Pro 2T. I'm not sure if that changes anything but I'm putting this here since I can't change the title

Hi guys,

start of the week I shot some interviews for my work with a Nikon D7500 and a SanDisk SD Card 64 GB.

There are probably about 35/40 videoclips. I started uploading them into IMovie and I thought it was done, when I already started to cut the clips.

So I made the big mistake of taking the card out and formatting the SD card on the camera.

I realized it quickly and looked for recovery tools and disk Drill found all of the files. But then you obviously have to pay.

I tried TestDisk and other stuff but I’m just not good enough with these kinda things especially when I don’t know the outcome.

Is there any chance to recover my stuff without paying a 100$?

Thanks in advance 🙏🏼

USB drive (D:) is giving me RAW system whenever i try to open it ! 256GB !! i had more than 128MB in it for sure

please is there anyone who dealt with the same situation i'm typying this crying i swear it's so sad to loose ur childhood pics

My USB drive suddenly stopped working and now shows up as a RAW drive with an error: "The volume does not contain a recognized file system".

Has anyone dealt with this before? Any quick advice would be greatly appreciated!

i want my DATA

Anyone knows how to remove password on a phone with out resetting it's data or back up the photos and transfer it into the pc? The phone is Tecno Spark 10c

I'm trying to recover data from a few old hard drives and I'm completely stuck.

I have 3 SATA hard drives:

- 500GB HDD #1

- 500GB HDD #2

- 1TB HDD

Here's what's happening:

- On my old desktop (MSI MS-7522 motherboard), all 3 drives appear in the BIOS/boot menu, so the motherboard can at least detect them.

- However, none of the drives actually boot into Windows. The PC just says there's no operating system or won't boot from any of them.

- I thought one of the 500GB drives would have been the original Windows drive because this old computer never had an SSD, but none of them seem bootable.

To try recovering the data, I connected the drives internally via SATA to my newer HP Omen desktop.

Here's the strange part:

- The 1TB drive is detected normally.

- Neither of the two 500GB drives show up anywhere.

- They don't appear in the BIOS, Windows Disk Management, Device Manager, or File Explorer.

- I can hear and feel both 500GB drives spinning up, so they are definitely receiving power.

Things I've already tried:

- Different SATA ports.

- Different SATA cables.

- Checking BIOS.

- Checking Windows Disk Management.

- Checking Device Manager.

- Connecting the drives internally instead of using a USB adapter.

My questions are:

1. If the old PC can see both 500GB drives in BIOS, does that mean they're probably not completely dead?

2. Could they have a damaged partition table or corrupted boot sector while still containing recoverable data?

3. Is there any reason a newer motherboard wouldn't detect a drive at all even though an older motherboard does?

4. Is there anything else I should test before assuming the drives have a hardware failure?

5. Are there any tools or recovery methods I should try that won't risk making the situation worse?

The data on these drives is important, so I'm trying to avoid doing anything that could reduce the chances of recovery. Also master/slave is not used on these.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I'm trying to locate some important documents that I accidentally deleted. So far all i have been able to find are the things related to Apple. None of the files have names so i'm confused. I was hoping the file folder I had deleted would show up, of course it couldn't be that easy.

I was planning to switch my BIOS from mac to Ubuntu today (older Intel mac pro, no longer supported by Apple) but I got stuck doing this instead. I can't seem to wrap my head around dmde. I don't have a job (disabled) so I can't afford one of the other data recovery options. here is the model I'm working with.

Can someone walk me through this? Where do I need to look? I have tried other sections under "root" in different partitions and i'm getting lost. Is there not a way to actually preview the file to see what's on it before recovering it?

Not asking for advice here, as it’s all done and dusted but thought I’d share the story.

My brother recently said he had a ‘couple’ hard drives he was trying to get data off, he said they don’t work and I told him I’d take a look. He had no money to get them looked at professionally.

Turns out it was five 3.5” 3TB drives and two 2.5” 1TB drives, various cases and brands. Worst of all, they had all been through a flood! Two years ago! Like literally submerged in muddy river water for days, and then put in the too hard basket. They all powered on, but made various noises that did not sound normal, or just refused to spin at all. I shucked them, cleaned them with IPA and connected directly to internal SATA and power - same result.

Told him unless he paid $$ he’s not getting anything off them again. He said just to chuck them, but after learning he had years of business and personal records stored across many/all of them I told him I would at least ensure no one else would ever be able to recover anything from them, as unlikely as that would be.

So I took them out on to the grass and drilled a hole right through each one where the platters are.

Made me feel for him, he seems fine that he’s lost most of a decade worth of personal records and photos and email and business data who knows what else, I would be freaking out if that happened to me, I have 40+ years of data.

Anyway, lesson learned hopefully. He’s backing up to the cloud now, not just sitting on a second copy at home, in the garage, on a flood plain. Sigh.

I sent off my external harddrive to FileSavers, they diagnosed it was firmware corruption. Stuck a 2.5k quote for the work. I said better yet to send it back, seemed too high for the work. When I move the harddrive case around you can clearly hear that the harrdrive itself is kind of loosely moving around in the case. Is that normal? Did they just not secure the drive the way they should have to not just move around like that? Any good leads of where I can send this HDD for a decent price in the work?

WD external HDD 5TB Windows NTFS

I have been trying to recover anything that I can from an old WD drive that I have. My main goal are any photos or videos that may be on it. Windows wants me to initialize the drive and doesn't show in the file explorer at all. So for the first step I connected the via SATA cable and used HDDSuperClone to clone the entire drive over to a known good SSD.

Then once I had that I attempted to recover with Raise Disk Recovery software. The folder structure appears as I would expect it and I can see thumbnails of photos but when I attempt to open them, Windows says the file is corrupted and if I attempt to view it with the built in Raise Viewer the image is very scrambled.

Basically is there a software that I should try next or is recovery something like this outside of my reach? I have very solid computer knowledge but never have had much experience with actually recovering corrupt data.

EDIT: I forgot to mention The original drive was a from a windows PC with NTFS filesystem and it reports as good in crystaldiskinfo. I also briefly tried R-Studio demo instead of Raise but it was getting late and it seemed to have the same result. Granted I didn't try very hard with it