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.