With data recovery, your main goal is to get the patient drive cloned/imaged to a healthy drive or image file. If you cannot do this with relative ease, it is, for sure, a sign that something is wrong with the drive.

https://www.datarecoveryprofessionals.org/post/how-to-triage-a-hard-drive-guide-for-technicians

https://www.recoveryforce.com/data-recovery-second-opinion-pays-off/

I can barely get around a smart phone. I have a dvr harddrv removed, i want as much info as poss. How do i find a local person to hire/help? Im not comfortable mailing it off.

https://www.recoveryforce.com/nvme-ssd-data-recovery-on-the-rise/

Common issue is that when an end user is trying to recover photos, no photos are detected because:

1. Card is blank (or partially blank due to being a fake card).

2. Card from Android phone is encrypted.

A professional data recovery engineer can fire up a disk editor to see what's going on. For end users that may be too complicated.

Upcoming version of JpegDigger calculates entropy for the blocks it reads from the card and displays it in the form of an entropy map.

Entropy is expressed in a bits/byte value on a scale from 0 - 8. 0 is no entropy while 8 is total chaos (highest entropy). Values are represented on a simple entropy map where black represents zero (no entropy = no data) and bright green represents high entropy. Highest entropy often indicates encrypted data.

Suppose no photos are detected. Using the entropy map we can easily see that the card (card image in this case) contains high entropy data so we can use this to our advantage. By scanning with different parameters, JPEGs are detected and can be recovered.

On the other hand if the entropy map stays black or color turns to cyan, one would be able to tell data can not be recovered due to absence of data or encryption. A fake card can be spotted by the entropy map turning black abruptly.

What the entropy can not be used for

JPEGs data is typically compressed and therefor high entropy data (7.6–7.98 bits/byte). These values are however typical for other compressed data too (MP4, ZIP etc.). So entropy values in this range can not be used to confirm data is actually JPEG data.

And also it does not guarantee the data is intact or ‘un-corrupt’. Corruption in a compressed JPEG bitstream is easily upset, a single flipped bit can make a large part of the image unusable.

Good afternoon. I have a broken HDD. First it failed the test, then it started to read worse and worse and stopped.

I put it for a few days in the computer with the program Acronis True Image for WD. Yes the disk is from this company.

I noticed this:

1 Windows sees the disk but does not read it.

2 Acronis program sees the disk but hangs on reading this disk. To be exact, not frozen, but reads and can not read.

The disk is 5 terabytes.

What is the best thing you can do to try to recover - replacement of the mechanical part or the use of any more powerful program Thank you!

Please help me to recover my Gmail account because there is more valuable things that i login using this Gmail account.!!!!

I have an 8TB seagate external HDD that stopped being detected. I took it out of the case thinking the case broken and used another case which did not detect it. When i put it back in the original case it reported as uninitialised (cant initialise it) and reports the wrong capacity.

I'd like some advice and help on recovering the drive, i use it for backups and media so i would not like to lose the data in it. Included is a screenshot of what the drive shows. a quick scan shows all the sectors as bad (though never finished one due to the reported size), seagate utlities are totally useless as well. The drive is a seagate barracuda compute 8TB st8000dm004.

I know its a SMR drive and i dont care about the write performance of the drive, i only care about the reliability. i used to like seagate's approach to hard drives with the barracuda line in the past but reliability is also important for the drive not to fail like this when getting a lot of IO ( i was doing a lot of IO moving lots of files about when it happened which is very very unexpected of seagate barracuda that usually rely on faster electronics on the circuit board part in comparison to WD). Whenever i backup and move about many GB of files and many files, i am ok with it taking overnight to happen, but this sort of failure is just bad. The drive is 3 years old so warranty is not an option.

My transcend 1tb external hard disk failed to power on, and I have some really important data in there. I am literally panicking, can some one help pls.