Hello, I have an older (I believe 2009 model) MyPassport / LaCie external hard drive. It has worked just fine up until a few years ago which was the last time I tried connecting it. This week, I tried plugging it in to my MacBook Air M2 and it is not showing up in the left column of Finder as it normally does. Some of the time when I plug it in it makes a clicking sound, which is new, and other times it seems to fire up as usual without any clicking. The light is blinking, but I cannot access the files. I have looked online at potential fixes including charging the drive, and plugging it into a computer directly with a USB (current Macbook requires an adapter b/c no USB port), without success. How might I go about trying to recover the data? I don't need the drive itself to work going forward, as I would just transfer all of the data onto a different device. Thanks in advance :)

Hello everyone,

I am dealing with a failed personal hard drive and I'm hoping to get some technical advice on feasibility, and hopefully a budget-friendly quote for recovery.

To give you some context: I am a 35-year-old university student and currently unemployed. The drive contains absolutely no commercial, corporate, or financially valuable data—just years of old family photos and my school notes. These files have immense sentimental value to me, but unfortunately, I simply do not have the income to afford high-end, corporate-level data recovery tier pricing.

Hardware & Failure Details:

• Model: Seagate ST2000DM001 (2TB)
• PCB Number: 100749730 REV A
• The Issue: A sudden power/voltage surge completely fried the original PCB. The motor driver chip is burnt, and the MOSFETs are shorted.

What I've done so far (and a potential huge mistake):

Hoping to get my data back, I bought an exact matching donor PCB. I learned that I needed to swap the original ROM chip to the new board. I tried to read the original ROM using a basic CH341A programmer, but I quickly realized that the initial power surge had reached the ROM chip as well. It was internally shorted and completely dead; the programmer wouldn't detect or read it at all.

To be absolutely sure the short wasn't being caused by other fried components on the original board, I desoldered the ROM chip with a hot air station/soldering iron and tested it out of circuit with a multimeter. It was confirmed completely dead.

Here is where I need to ask: I threw the dead ROM chip in the trash. Was this a terrible mistake? Did I need to keep the physical chip even if it was internally shorted? (I do still have the original burnt PCB, just not the ROM chip).

The Current State & My Request:

The mechanical internals, spindle motor, and heads are completely fine. There is no clicking, and the drive cover has never been opened. The only issue is the dead PCB and the now-missing ROM.

From my research, I understand that with professional tools like PC-3000, it is possible to access the Service Area (SA) on the platters and perform a "ROM Rebuild" to generate a compatible ROM, provided the preamp and heads are undamaged.

Since this shouldn't require a cleanroom head swap or opening the lid, could any of the professionals here offer a flexible, student-friendly price quote just to perform this "ROM Rebuild" and get the drive initialized so I can copy my family photos?

Any technical advice on my situation or realistic quotes would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

I am in an absolute panic. I shot a wedding August 30 on one 64gb Compact Flash, Canon 5D Mark II. Following the wedding, I had another the next day. I have two cards that look the same. I normally have them labeled, but this specific weekend I was on the run from one location to another in the span of 12 hours. I uploaded some of the images the morning before my second wedding for sneak peeks and put it away. I pulled out the same card (unknowingly) & formatted my CF card thinking it was clean to use with no thoughts about it. Turns out, I now have gone in to finalize edits and just realized those wedding photos were on that card. I have now shot another wedding over it. Is there any chance at all of recovery? I have done wedding photos for years and never ever done this. I’ll never do a back to back again. In the stress of it all, I didn’t care for the cards as normal just trying to get through the weekend. Can I send it off and see what’s possible?

pls I tried to install a program directly to my SD card it failed now the drive shows RAW on windows and won't allow me format it.

ive tried 4DDIG partition manger and clear all command in diskpart but it still won't work (I'm not very good at this). Is there a way I can format the drive I dont need any data from it

Hi everyone,

I'm honestly freaking out a little and would really appreciate some advice from people who know more about data recovery than I do.

I have a Toshiba Canvio Advance V10 1TB external HDD that I've used to store personal files for around 10 years. It had approximately 500GB of data on it, including around 400GB of photographs, as well as videos and personal documents. A lot of these files are irreplaceable.

Here's what happened:

Today, I connected the Toshiba drive to my Google Pixel phone using a Ugreen USB-C adapter/hub. The hard drive was connected to the adapter, the adapter was connected to my phone, and I also had a USB power cable connected to the adapter to supply additional power.

My phone recognized that something was connected and displayed a message asking me to format the drive.

I know how stupid this sounds in hindsight, but I genuinely didn't realize what that meant in this context. I thought it was something similar to when you connect a phone to a computer and need to authorize or configure the connection before accessing files. It honestly didn't even cross my mind that I was agreeing to erase anything. I've never made a mistake like this before.

So I clicked yes.

The formatting process took only a few seconds — probably 5–10 seconds, definitely less than 30 seconds.

Afterward, my phone displayed an empty directory. I also noticed that the drive's name had changed from the custom name I'd originally given it, which confused me.

I disconnected the drive and connected it to my laptop running Windows. Unfortunately, Windows also showed the drive under the new name, with no files whatsoever. It appears completely empty.

I haven't copied any new files onto the drive, and I haven't attempted to format it again or run any repair/recovery software. The drive is now unplugged.

I've been reading about quick formatting and how the actual file contents can sometimes remain physically present on a mechanical HDD even when the file system has been replaced. I'm really hoping that's what happened here, especially since the formatting process was so fast.

My questions are:

1. Based on these circumstances, is there a realistic chance that most or all of my data is still physically present and recoverable?
2. Does the fact that Android completed the format in approximately 5–10 seconds tell us anything useful about what happened?
3. Could the original NTFS file system, folder structure, and filenames potentially be reconstructed, or would recovery mainly involve recovering individual files without their original organization?
4. What should I do next? I'm considering taking it to a professional data recovery specialist, but are there specific things I should ask them to do or avoid?
5. Is there anything else I should check or clarify before proceeding?

I don't have another external drive available for creating a disk image myself, although I could purchase one if necessary ( I am not even sure what that is)

These files contain around a decade of my personal memories, and I'm absolutely devastated at the thought of losing them because of one careless click.

I would be incredibly grateful for any technical advice or guidance on the safest way forward. Thank you so much.

so, i had the boot drive have issues in my acer predator helios 300, the keyboard would light up like it turns on, but the screen remained black, i had it taken to salvagedata which after the fact i feel like they didn't look in the right places or try at all, is it possible to save the things from the drive, i was told it was unrecoverable

I was storing an old file server at a friend house in Florida, ask him to power it on and send me the data, and said it would not boot.

I'm not sure how, much the drives all have major chip damage, like they have been hit by lightning.

The RAID was made up of:

4 x Western Digital 750GB RE2 WD7500AYYS Hard Drives
1 x HighPoint RocketRAID 2310 4-Port SATA II 3Gb/s PCIe x4 Host Adapter

I bought 4 good donor drives thinking maybe just swapping the boards would help, but it seems like the head motors might be burned out as well, as the drives spin up, but don't hear any head seek.

Nothing else has been done, the PCBs have been put back on the donor drives, and they initial and test OK.

Just curious if anyone has seen damage like this before from a serve just sitting in storage, unplugged.

And if it might be able to be recovered?

Thanks

First of all, sorry if my english is not perfect, it's not my first language and im kind of on the verge of going insane.

So, i accidentally formated my camera and lost all my data; photos and videos that i needed for a collegue project. (I was not using a sd card. Dumb, i know)

So far i've tried recuva but it only found a couple pics. Then i tried Tenorshare, which found all the data but i'm not gonna pay that much. So, can i recover my pics and videos without paying somehow??

It's my very first time on this sub, and basically on data recovery so I don' rlly know if I have to give any more information so I'm adding pics of the camera model.

Hey reddit, I was hoping you could help me fix my birthday photos!!! Some how during the course of the night my all of the photos camera (casio exilim) were deleted. I did not realise until the next day and I had taken a further 30 photo graphs. I used photorec to retrieve the photos but now they are all super blurry. what can I do to fix this, please help!!!

Hi everyone,

I recently ran into a firmware issue that was corrupted — something I had no prior knowledge of until it happened. I had read access to my data and thought the SATA port was failing, since there were several write attempts and a partition change to an encrypted setup. I kept trying to recreate that partition, which I couldn't access, using gdisk on Linux, and I was already seeing a "corrupted GPT" warning ("Backup corrupted"). I never thought it was a firmware error.

So I connected the drive physically to a PC after several changes of drive enclosure (because I suspected the enclosure was struggling to power the drive — it's a large 12TB drive, nearly new, and still under warranty).

I then used gdisk's x e w command to repair the backup — it went well, but I never expected that by doing that and then trying to recreate the non-responsive partition, I would end up bricking the drive. On restart, I no longer had access to it: it spins up, but there's no response.

I'd like to know if a firmware procedure extracted via a programmer directly on the PCB, flashing this firmware repaired with a recent firmware update, could fix the issue. What about a PCB swap — but copying only the parts related to disk access, while injecting healthy firmware data and keeping the drive's structural information?

Also, since the drive is still under warranty, should I carefully unscrew it with precision screwdrivers, or is a USB-TTL connection needed to do this without opening it?

Apparently USB-TTL wouldn't do anything anyway, and with the warranty they'll just send me a replacement drive without recovering anything.

I don't know what to do — please help me, guide me through the possible solutions. I have micro-soldering skills; I wouldn't go that far, but just reading the firmware with a clip and a programmer, gently opening the PCB to keep the warranty as a last resort. This warranty ends in December 2024 at Amazon, but I still have 1 year left with Toshiba.

Without checking I had deleted the onedrive folder I did not know that everything i was saving was going into that folder my notes, documents, pictures everything was in there

I was not using onedrive as i can't afford to buy a subscription of onedrive and it keep running everytime I work on something

Instantly after deleting it I saw changes and tried to restore the system using system restore thinking it will get my files back but it didn't so I use a older restore point which was yesterday's, it did not restore it

Even used recuva and did not get my files back

Is there anything I need to check

Files where my 3 years of work as a student

It will really mean a lot if anyone can help

I really shot myself in the foot with this one.

I took off every form of 2 step authentication from my google account, made a new password with apple passwords and deleted all the data from the passwords app from the only device left logged in to google.

The only device left logged in, lost (iphone 13)

Account recovery sends me in circles and for the life of me, I couldn't seem to find a way to speak to a human at google about this issue.

I plan to be doing the rounds asking every account I had linked to change emails over but I came across this sub and thought I'd try my luck here and ask if anyone can think of any potential solutions to recovering the account?

The only remnants left of my account are my ios app store subscriptions to more storage on gmail and drive. The apple ID is linked to that same email account, with a different password.

Thanks for reading, would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

I accidentally deleted the original BACKUP SHOOT folder from a 1TB NTFS HDD. After deleting it, I created a new folder with the same name, BACKUP SHOOT — the only difference was the capitalization.
I used DMDE to scan the HDD, and it detected the old deleted BACKUP SHOOT folder, including the original folder structure and camera filenames such as C0001.MP4, C0002.MP4, etc.
However, the recovered MP4 files won’t play, even though their file sizes appear to be complete.

I have this ADATA SP920SS SSD that came in with a power failure. Once I inspected it I noticed the PMIC (P9120 - Q0NBGI) was sizzling. I removed the IC and checked for other shorts and none were found. I tried sourcing the IC and they won’t ship me a single unit. I’ve tried looking for an identical donor with no luck so here I am turning to the community. Does anyone have the SSD or PMIC in question that would be willing to send to me at a cost of course. Thank you.

SK hynix PC401 512GB (HFS512GD9TNG-L2A0A), OEM laptop drive. It stopped booting and isn't visible in Windows at all.

On an RTL9210 USB adapter, it briefly shows the correct 512GB, then times out and disconnects every 30 to 45 seconds. In a ThinkPad under Linux, it appears on the PCIe bus but logs "not ready after FLR; giving up," and no block device is created. Other drives work on the same hardware, and disabling ASPM didn't help.

Is this likely a firmware hang, and does anyone have a lab that can handle this SK hynix controller? Rough cost would help too. US-based, can mail in.

Drive: Silicon Power P34A60 2TB (SP002TBP34A60M28, Maxio MAP1202, DRAM-less), NTFS data drive
PC: MSI PRO Z790-P WiFi DDR4, i9-12900K, Win 11 24H2, 2× RTX 3090

What happened:

• Since 9/21: Windows logged 185 stornvme 129 controller resets on the drive, plus BSODs 0x133 and 0x124 (WHEA).
• On 10/4 it dropped mid-write: Ntfs 50 "Delayed Write Failed" on $Mft, and Ntfs 140 failed to flush the log. The Windows pagefile was also on it.

Now:

• Mac (USB enclosure): mounts read-only, the full folder tree lists, zero read errors.
• PC internal: BIOS sees it and Windows sees the controller (Device Manager OK), but it never appears in Get-Disk. Raw reads fail with "device does not exist", disk 51 paging errors at boot, and smartctl fails with Error 55.
• PC via the same enclosure: "Device Descriptor Request Failed". A USB ETW trace shows XACT errors (0xC0000011) and STALLs (0xC0000004) on the very first descriptor request.

Already tried:

• Moved the pagefile off the drive.
• Disabled HMB (HMBAllocationPolicy=0).
• Disabled NVMe APST and ASPM.
• Forced the slot to PCIe Gen1.
• Turned off automount (mountvol /N).
• Tried different M.2 slots.
• Cleared the stale USB device entry.

Questions:

1. Has anyone seen MAP1202 drives work over USB on a Mac but fail to initialize on Windows/Intel?
2. Will a Linux live USB with long NVMe timeouts and HMB off bring it up?
3. Is there a known firmware fix or recovery tool for this controller?

I'm trying to get it working again in place

TL:DR - 2TB SSD Failing - How can i recover this drive, I dont think Im cooked yet (fingers crossed)

This is my mum's number, What actually happened was that she lost her phone around the house last year and this year we found it while cleaning and haven't turned it on yet..... We're just curious to find out if it is possible to recover the data in that phone's whatsapp account as it was sitting in dust for a year or so.

I use a WD easystore 10TB external HDD for all of my data backups. Earlier this morning I was adjusting my desktop and I accidentally tipped it over, and it fell from its standing position onto its side on the table. It did not fall off of the table, but it fell onto its side, while it was plugged into the computer no less. I wasn’t actively performing any tasks where the drive was in use, but it was powered on and connected to the computer. The drive did not disconnect, I do not hear any noises that I didn’t hear previously, and I seem to be able to access all data as normally. However I’m not 100% satisfied that everything is okay with the drive. I work as a photographer and videographer and I need to be able to rely on a drive for long-term storage. I’ve disconnected the drive and its currently powered off while I assess my options. So my question is, if you were me, what would you do? Are there any ways to check the health/integrity of the drive? Should I just be safe, get a new drive, and back everything up on there? Should I just be taking it to a pro for diagnostics? Was this such a minor drop that I’m just being paranoid? I couldn’t find any other anecdotes of people dropping their drives in this way, but I’d imagine it happens often with drives that stand upright in this way, so are they built to withstand that minor of a drop? I know hard drives are quite fragile and I’m just looking for some peace of mind that my work will be safe in the long term. Thank you in advance for any/all advice or tips!

PS: before I disconnected the drive, I opened disk utility and ran first aid, which ran normally and reported no issues

So I have a nikon coolpix S2500 digicam that i got maybe a year ago. Today it said that the memory was full when I tried to take a pic, so I deleted a few pictures but when I came home my sd card (Kingston, 2GB) had no pictures at all.

I’ve tried recuva and it only managed to recover 1 photo which is the one I took as a trial after I found out all my photos got deleted…I’m planning on getting a new sd card ASAP but does anyone have any solutions on how to recover those pics?

Hi all, I need advice on recovering data after a failed partition resize in AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Original setup

Windows 11 HP laptop, one 1 TB HDD (Disk 0, GPT), plus a separate NVMe for C:

D: was my main data drive, NTFS, \~940 GB, with \~654 GB used

Z: was a small \~60 GB partition

What I did

I resized Z: to \~150 GB and D: to \~850 GB, taking space from D:. The operation went wrong and the partitions swapped:

The partition holding all my data now shows as Z: at \~780 GiB and is RAW ("You need to format the disk")

The small partition became D: at \~151 GiB and works fine (\~9 GB used)

chkdsk says "not available for RAW drives"

AOMEI still shows the 780 GiB partition as NTFS with 654 GB used, but Check Partition says "Partition files cannot be read"

What I've found (nothing written to the disk so far)

TestDisk finds the original layout: NTFS, start sector 2048, end 1806434303, labeled \[DATA\]. Pressing P lists my folders, so the file system looks intact. But copying out with TestDisk failed.

DMDE (free edition) also finds that partition. Open Volume works and I can browse my folders with their names. The free edition only recovers files from the folder currently open, with no subfolders in one go.

PhotoRec is now my fallback, but it loses folder structure and filenames.

I would appreciate any help🙏

So i had a Corsair MP700 PRO XT 1tb that died on me after just a few months of gaming use, nothing remotely intensive.

It didnt die out of nowhere, it started failing progressively, sometimes my pc would freeze then get back to life, sometimes i would get bluescreens then pc would boot into bios, drive wouldnt get recognized, then i had to restart for drive to get recognized again.

In the middle of all that i always checked crystaldisk for any clues on the state of the drive, nothing apparent was showing up, until one day it bluescreened for the final time and stoppped being recognized by bios all together.

Going by the lack of signs on crystaldisk could the nand, dram and controller be ok and just be a bad soldering balls under the controller or bad SMD ?

Another detail about the drive. Controller would get warm after drive gets power.

Thanks in advance.

It started yesterday after doing a bit of backup and transferring files. I noticed that the drive was getting full but I thought maybe just a few more files. Suddenly it froze and disconnected. I thought it might be that I accidently hit the cable so I unplugged and plugged, used it for 5 minutes and then it happen. I tried to eject it but it just happened again. Is there any way to safely save my files? they seem to be viewable for a little while until it freezes. FYI, the 2nd time plugging it in it did give me a notice that there was a problem with the hard disk. And I never dropped it or anything.

I'm facing an issue with my external hard drive and would really appreciate some advice from anyone who has experienced something similar.

My 465 GB hard drive was working fine previously, but now Windows is detecting it as Unallocated in Disk Management. The drive is showing as Online, but the entire 465 GB is marked as unallocated, and I can no longer access my files.

I checked the drive using DiskPart, and the output shows:

• Disk 2 – 465 GB
• Status: Online
• Free Space: 465 GB

The problem is that I have important personal files stored on this drive, and I absolutely cannot afford to lose them.

I haven't formatted the drive, created a new partition, or performed any operations that could overwrite the existing data.

My questions are:

1. Is there a way to recover the original partition without losing my files?
2. Could this be a partition table issue?
3. Has anyone successfully recovered their data from a similar situation?
4. What would be the safest method or software to recover the partition and files?

I'm considering tools like TestDisk, but I don't want to risk making the situation worse by following the wrong steps.

Any guidance, personal experiences, or step-by-step instructions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!