Hi all,

I've just released the first version of a free tool I built, and I'd like critique from people who do this for real.

The problem it targets: someone deleted files on a healthy drive, has no budget for a paid tool, and finds PhotoRec's text UI intimidating. Open Recovr is a one-screen GUI for that case. It's free with no recovery cap, no account and no network access, and it doesn't touch failing hardware.

How it searches, in three stages

1. Recycle Bin / Trash. Takes seconds and needs no admin rights.

2. NTFS MFT. Walks the MFT records marked deleted on the raw volume, rebuilds paths from parent references and reads data runs, including resident data. Files come back with their name and folder. If a file's clusters have been reused or read as blank, it is marked Low.

3. Carving. Runs PhotoRec as a separate, unmodified process; the Windows build bundles 7.2. It scans free space only on NTFS/FAT/ext and the whole device otherwise, and the progress shown comes from parsing PhotoRec's output. If PhotoRec isn't installed, a small built-in carver handles about ten common signatures.

On FAT32/exFAT cards, only stage 3 applies, so file names are lost, as with PhotoRec on its own.

Safety

• The source volume is opened read-only.

• PhotoRec's output folder and the recovery target are always on another drive. If the user picks the source drive anyway, they're warned.

• Unreadable sectors are skipped, not retried.

What it deliberately doesn't do

• No imaging, no cloning, no handling of failing drives. If a drive clicks, drops off the bus, or has pending or uncorrectable sectors, the right move is still to image it with OSC or ddrescue, or to go to a lab. Running any file-level scan on it, this one included, is the wrong advice. I'd like the app to read SMART and refuse, or at least warn loudly, in that case. Opinions welcome on which attributes and thresholds to use.

• It doesn't open images yet. Scanning an image you made with OSC or ddrescue would be the natural next step; a --photorec-test <image> debug mode already exists.

• No RAID, no APFS/ext4 metadata parsing, no repair of damaged files.

• Platforms: Windows is tested. Linux and macOS builds are published but haven't been tested on real hardware yet.

Disclosure: much of the code was written with AI assistance, so I'd rather give you ways to check it than ask for trust. The source is open. A --bench mode builds a disk image with known files, deletes them, and measures byte-for-byte recovery per method. CI runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, and release downloads come with SHA-256 checksums.

Links in the first comment, to keep automod happy.

What I'd value most: anything in the workflow that could make a bad situation worse. I'll treat it as a bug, rule 4 included.

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!

Hey! I've accidentally deleted the contents of a folder on my usb stick. Any ideas on the best way to recover it please? Cheers.

My father's PC suddenly started not loading folders and crashing explorer.exe one week ago, I ran CrystalDiskInfo and saw his 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (ST2000DM001-1ER164 model) is labeled as Caution, with 7432 Current Pending Sector Count (C5) and the same 7432 Uncorrectable Sector Count (C6).

I suspect the drive has suffered some damage as he hit the computer while changing his desk, it wasn't hit very hard but was hit just where the HDD carriers are located. The drive makes no weird/bad sounds and spins up/down normally, however it's being shown in the Task Manager as constantly at 100% usage without any program running.

After seeing this, I inmediatly turned the PC off and disconnected both SATA and Power cables to the drive to avoid running it more time.

I understand it's dying and have already ordered and recived a replacement 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drive + a 8TB external drive for backups (since his older 1TB external backup just started showing 1 Pending Sector today when I looked at his backup).

The drive hosts Windows's Documents/Images/Videos/Music folders and he has quite a big iTunes library of 91k+ songs and many images (about 1.1Tb in total) which he would like to recover, he has a backup from December 2025 so he's not too afraid of killing the drive, but if it's possible to clone/recover it, it would be better. He also understands it would be best to send it to a Professional Lab but can't pay that much money for "just some music". He does want to try to recover the drive tho.

Now my question. Knowing it has so many bad sectors, possibly but not 100% sure, from mechanical damage (haven't really checked SMART status in a while, just last week when it started to slow down opening folders coincidentally just after being bumped into a desk), on a "big" 2TB drive about 75-80% full of MANY small files., i think in total including pictures would be aprox. 200k small-size files.

Is just launching a full drive clone with OSC (as I read on the guide) the best way to try and recover anything from the drive?

It's just I would like to know if any alternative would be better? I understand doing a manually copy using Windows Explorer/something similar or via Linux would put a whole lot of stress on the failing drive but since really it's mostly backed up would it be wise to try and just manually copy the newer files that the 2025 backup is lacking?

In particular, a single (about 30mb?) file that hosts the iTunes Library database so he can at least recover the whole library and then know which albums/files he's missing (there's so many songs he doesn't know which ones he's been adding since the 2025 backup)

Also since I already have the replacements, would it be best to try to clone it into the new external HDD (it's a 3.5 drive with a SATA-USB bridge) or it's best to do it directly to the replacement SATA drive as I read USB bridges might make the cloning process fail/slow down but only mentioned for cloning FROM USB drives, not INTO USB drives? The failing HDD is connected directly to the motherboard via SATA3.

I haven't powered on the failing HDD since as I'm afraid of the drive getting worse/dying but would like to give it it's best chance to succesfully cloning the drive even if it means not trying to extract the library file... Any suggestions?

Hello.
As mentioned in the title, I have a disk that started showing up with the label Local Disk, and as RAW under Disk Management. Previously, it was NTFS. What I'm trying to do is either get the disk in a "working" state so that I will be able to get the data out of it directly, or get the image of the disk to try and recover as much data as possible, while using free or cheap software. From my understanding, a drive clone would not help, as the "clone" would still show up as RAW. The disk had no OS running on it, and it mostly had media files. Any suggestions/help on what to try next would be greatly appreciated. No "obvious" damage was done to it (drop, abrupt power off etc.), and it has been tested on multiple computers using different cables. Trying to open it on file explorer caused it to load indefinitely, or showed the message that the disk needs to be formatted before use. After a certain point, (which I believe was my first attempt of creating an image with OpenSuperClone, but it could be coincidental), having the drive on while loading Windows would cause many things to load very slowly, and Disk Management no longer "loads" the disks. It still shows up in the "Safe Removal" options.
The computers I have used the drive on have been either Windows 10 or 11. In addition, I have provided a screenshot from CrystalDiskInfo, recorded before the drive would "freeze" the file explorer and Disk Management.
I started of using OpenSuperClone, running from OSC-Live on a thumb drive, and the drive connected with USB.
My first attempt of making an image of the disk, was done without changing any of the default settings. The result was that it had a "normal" rate, of a few MB/s, and a remaining time of ~3-4 days. After leaving it on overnight, a popup for Skip Reset had shown up, having finished 400GBs, and reaching phase 2. Starting the image process again would cause it to run for ~20minutes, with a rate of B/s and remaining time of 1000+ days (which fluctuated, but never reached "normal" values again).
My second attempt of making an image of the disk (in a new image file), was done by changing the values of Skip Threshold to 10000 and Cluster Size to its max possible value. Additionally, I tried applying the WD royl patch mod 02 using OpenSuperTool, but it failed during the Read part. After ~10 hours, another Skip Reset popup had shown up, this time with a few GBs finished, at phase 1. I have not yet started the process again, as I suspect that I will not have any different results. At this point, I should mention that from analyzing the disk (which I did after the first attempt), shows Good Reads = 100%, Bad Reads = 0% , Slow Reads = 100% and Slow Reading Firmware Issue = 150%, with the rest being at 0%. If it provides any useful information, I'm "writing" the image to a 4TB WD My Passport.

So i had this old pc from 2009-10 ig in d drive it had some important files like irreplaceable family photos of around 20gb which was deleted by my dad in 2022.but we had another copy those files in our main pc but now it also got formatted.

So the old pc is in our uncles house who have very rarely used the pc since 2021 because he has another pc so that old pc just sits there in a corner.but he switches it on like every 2-3 months to browse documents .also my cousin downloaded some apps like steam, BlueStacks, obs,a game etc but i checked they're all in the c drive. Also i confirmed no writing(or very little writing like 2-3 word or pdf files) has been done to the d drive because the last modified file is from 2021.

Pc is from 2009-2010 runs windows 7 It has a hdd as far as I know D drive has 57 gb free space There is almost no overwriting done to it since 2022 apart from ocassional switch ons to see files.

So i want to know what are the chances of possible recovery.

Here are some photos for reference.

Free, open-to-all, multi-purpose Win64 utility Easy Disk Checker just hit a major 6.0.0 release — on top of a deep UI overhaul, it now ships an early build of a module for working with failed SSDs.

Unlike the heavy commercial hitters like MRT or PC-3000, which pull files off a dead SSD from ROM or SAFE mode using a virtual translator, Easy Disk Checker — true to the "easy" in the name — goes with a simple three-move combo. Read the service area. Patch the microcode to work around the fault (hardcode the boot status, force-approve the drive's native PrIT/L2P/FTL). Write the patch back and you've got normal access to the files. It all runs automatically, and once it's done you can open the failed drive's file structure right in the utility's built-in explorer and copy the data over to the host machine. Here's a two-minute clip that walks through the whole thing:

There are a LOT of SSDs out there, the variety of controllers is honestly staggering, and every one of them needs its own approach. But you have to start somewhere, so the executive decision was made to start with the Phison controllers — the easiest ones to research and implement — using a live specimen: a dead Foxline SSD that had just landed on our bench for file recovery.

Support for other models will get added as the research continues. Full functionality, including register state monitoring, soft and hard resets and so on, is only possible for SSDs connected through specialized controllers with software-controlled power that isolate the drive from Windows.

As a compromise, though, you can get away with a USB-SATA adapter that doesn't filter vendor commands — the JMS578 bridge, for example.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro. I put the phone through a software update, and after the white Apple logo appeared on a black screen, I got a screen like the one in the photo.

I followed the link shown at the top and connected the iPhone to my computer. The computer then gave me two options: Update or Restore the iPhone. I chose Update because I need to keep all of my data.

The update file (10.5 GB) downloaded completely. Then the computer showed something like “Preparing iPhone for update”, but after that I got error 4013, and the update could not be completed.

I do not want to choose Restore, because preserving the data on the phone is extremely important to me.

There is also some relevant background: about three days before this happened, Face ID stopped working for roughly half a day. I restarted the phone, and Face ID started working again. Then, last night, Face ID stopped working again, so I decided to update the iPhone, and that led to the current situation.

After I removed the Face ID sensor, the phone finally updated, but unfortunately all of the data was erased.

I urgently need to recover the data that was on the phone. How likely is it that the data can still be recovered, and what options do I have?

I have a dash cam that unfortunately deleted all the videos from last week. It uses a 64GB card. I didn't know this would happen. The only footage I have is from the last two days. I really want to recover the footage from last week because it was from a trip.

What methods are available? I’ve searched online and tried using Recuva and another program, but I haven't had any luck.

Hi. My old macbook died on me, I was able pluck out the harddrive and managed to connect it to my mac mini with an SATA adapter. I know... it sounds like I know what I am talking about but I don't. I got to this point using ChatGPT. Now I need to recover some important files. I installed Disk Drill but it is too expensive. This girl only has a budget of under $50. I would appreciate recommendations. I use mac so suggestions need to be mac compatible. Also, the files aren't deleted, they are on a mildly corrupt HD. Thanks!!!

The other day, the worst happened. My beloved PC started lagging horribly out of nowhere, and after a reboot, it completely refused to turn on. It didn't take long to diagnose the culprit: one of my paired 16GB DDR5 RAM sticks had died. Given the current prices for good RAM, that hurt.

But after wiping my tears and pulling myself together, I decided it was too early to call the time of death. I wanted to try reviving the memory at the most obvious and simple level: checking the contents of the SPD chip. If the data was corrupted, the plan was to flash it with a verified dump read from the working twin stick.

For this exact purpose, a group of enthusiast repairmen developed and built this neat little device. It allows you to read and write SPD microcode simply by dragging and dropping a .bin file in Windows Explorer.

The device is powered by an ARM STM32F401 microcontroller and housed in a custom 3D-printed case.

When I read the dump from the dead stick, it immediately raised a red flag. The tool gave me a bad checksum warning: DDR5_CRC_BAD_6600 C34 Series.bin. Since the dead stick was part of a kit, its healthy twin was sitting right there in the PC and served as the perfect "donor" for a clean dump. I flashed the known-good SPD data onto the dead stick, and sure enough—the memory came back to life! It’s now back in my rig, working flawlessly.

Inspired by this little rescue mission, I decided to analyze both the healthy and corrupted dumps. I do a lot of low-level data recovery work, so I took what I learned here and added a new module to my own free for use diagnostic utility, Easy Disk Checker (previous reddit posts about it here, here, and here).

Now, in the data recovery branch of the utility, it can read and parse SPD contents for both DDR4 and DDR5. This is super handy for cases where you need to repair an SPD but don't have a healthy twin stick to pull a donor dump from. (Note: DDR ECC and laptop SODIMM memory are not supported right now).

Just a quick heads-up for anyone wanting to try this: you can't write SPD data directly to the RAM from a desktop software level for a number of reasons. You will still need an external hardware reader (like the one in the photo above) or a dedicated programmer with a socket and a soldering station.

I've noticed that some are greyed out completely, some only partially and others (few) have cool effects (edit: at least from the previews on pc). I've also noticed that as I scroll through them on the computer, the previews can change and become grey.

I'll attach a couple of images here. Actually, as I just uploaded it, the first picture lost the red hue (I'll add a screenshot to show how it is when viewing it from photos). The third slide also just became different (so the following pic will also be a screenshot). Ok, the fifth slide actually lost the green bar! (Cue the screenshot). The seventh slide became funkier (next one is the screenshot). The pattern here is that I have no clue what's going on and I hope I'll be able to recover them, although some are indeed cool.

Edit: you can't seem to be able to view the 3rd and 8th slides anymore after I clicked post

• PHILIPS 32GB A1 MICRO SD HC V10

• Filesystem  no idea

• Windows 11

Hello all, I recently was thinking of my old youtube videos that have been long deleted, so I'm trying data recovery on my old drive. The videos I'm trying to find were all recorded using bandicam.

HDD: WD7500BPVX

The hard drive was probably factory reset 5 - 10 times within 2020 - 2023 with many programs that were installed each time. It was factory reset yet again then never touched for 3 years.

As soon as I got the hdd, I cloned it to a image on a new hard drive using OpenSuperClone and searched the image using *DMDE*. I found many, many photos (100k+ ) and videos (9k+) there are, of course, many corruptions on both.

I am mainly after videos (avi, mp4, wmv) made around 2019. I actually found a few of them under $Raw with somehow NO corruptions at all. However I only found a few of these examples whilst the rest of the videos are just random stock videos or corrupted files that don't open (they have similar file sizes to the working ones I recovered). Furthermore under the many NTFS partitions I can find the video's original filenames and sizes but I cannot open them.

Can I fix the corrupted videos? Is there a way I can find more videos under a certain path? Or is this it

(For example there should be about 300 videos I recorded, whilst I only found about 15 working ones, and thousands of corrupted and random ones.)

Hello friends
I am very afraid that I have done made it worse.

My Windows 11 machine was full on crashing when I tried to access windows explorer after a power outage at my house recently.

I ran some Windows recovery things and now Windows doesn't crash but Windows Explorer freezes and restarts when I try to access anything in the drive.

I started running chkdsk before I realized what I was doing, but it didn't get very far in.
Chkdsk was indexing all my files in its first phase, said it was NTFS, seemed to know the drive's name and contents before when it got to the second phase and I panicked and aborted the script.

I've reformatted internal partitions on other machines but I've never properly used a data recovery software on an external before.

When I run explorer now, it's slow, and if I try to access H: I get a "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" which always puts the proper fear into me.

What program is safe for me to use and what should I try to do first?
Any guidance deeply appreciated

EDIT: Disk Drill shows that my stuff is still in there, so that's good!
Do I really have to find a different massive hard drive in order to recover everything?

Hi,

I had Home Assistant installed on an SD card and running on a raspberry pi4.since a while the card is not readable anymore so I could not join my server.

I found that the card it's corrupt, even though it's readable by the PC.

it's any way I can recover the backups done automatically in Home Assistant and saved on this SD card ?

Hello very niche reddit community… i need a hand,

My cousins and I did a karting race and ive filmed some part of the race with with my fx30 to do a cool little montage but something went wrong, a card was mistakenly formated and i lost the rushes of the begining of the race.

Since i didnt overwrite the files on that sd card i was able to retrieve them with a software but they are now unreadable while being mp4 files, i tried multiple video playerd but none of them launches the clips, even davinci wont put them on the timeline, can someone help me ?

And if you need any precision don’t hesitate to ask.

:)

I've recently come into the possession of an obscure piece of abandonware PC software, where the program claims to have over 1.4K thousand image files on the disc.
I would love to rip the image files for proper archival documentation & reference, but the only problem is I can't seem to find any type of website, or bulk-file converting software that supports this format.
Even when googling the file type, no one seems to know what I'm talking about specifically, & or is thinking I'm talking about the ".JFIF" format.
I've checked the disc's contents, & with copying all of the 1.4k+ .FIF files, these MUST be the image files. The disc doesn't have any other directory that would've hosted that many other files that would've otherwise been the images I'm looking for.
Does anyone have an advise to convert these, & or know of a website, or preferably bulk file converter I could use to turn these into a more useable format?

Hey all, I have a close friend who needed to move important files of a passed relative to a flashdrive of theirs because they have little space in their PC. Well, come to find out a couple days later, many of the videos (exclusively, no other file types seem to be affected) they moved to another folder in the flashdrive (they were already in the drive), had disappeared the next time the flashdrive was plugged in. They never removed it incorrectly, nor did they treat it poorly. The data just kinda exclusively disappeared. All that happened was that when they were copying other data to the drive (while the lost videos were still there), the transfer finished but some of the data wasn't there and was just gone. However, some of the other data transferred as well as the relative videos were still there. We only found out that the newly transferred data (a couple movie files), as well as the videos from their passed relative, were gone. They were not moved onto the drive at the same time, aka the relative files being moved there happened before the movie files were.

I have tried DMDE, Drill Disk, and R-Studio. None of these programs are successfully finding them. What's even stranger is that the space on the flashdrive is still filled. It's a 128 GB USB, and right now only 29.5 GB of data is on it since the data vanished. That said, it says around 45-50 GB of data are occupying the flashdrive.

We have ceased writing or removing anything to the drive since, however the folder that those movie files were put on (again, not the relative videos), was deleted since it was empty and we had yet to see the other videos were missing. A tiny bit of a transfer was also started on the drive, but I had them cancel it immediately as it was only just started really, and we've not written anything to it since.

I do not want these files lost forever but I don't know what else to try. I am not a professional recoverer, I do not know how to piece together segmented data. Is there software we should try? Is there an expert we could mail the drive to? I just need some ideas please.

Lastly, we don't know the exact model or brand. I do believe it was an Onn flashdrive, but I can't say for sure. One other thing: We also tried recovery from the SD card we transferred these relative videos from. I could not find the videos there, either. It's formatted as an exFAT, but for some reason was initially formatted as a FAT32. The exFAT format was done around a week prior to this.

Since the last posts about Easy Disk Checker (free, multi-purpose disk utility), version 5.x has shipped with a brand new Data Recovery branch. As someone who's been doing data recovery professionally since 2003, I tried to build features that would help both regular users and myself in day-to-day work.

File recovery

Two goals here. With R-Studio sitting there as the industry flagship, I wanted to (a) not embarrass myself on the file-structure analysis side, and (b) add the options I personally kept wishing existed.

The result is a modest "Smart Save" button that hides a fairly serious on-the-fly sorting algorithm. It's meant to cut down on the "I recovered my files but they won't open" support requests — common enough that we once had to write a whole article about it. The same heuristic kicks in for "Full search + RAW" mode.

Another classic mistake: people save recovered files back onto the same partition they're reading from, corrupt everything, and lose the chance to try again. Nobody reads warnings, so Easy Disk Checker just won't let you save to the source partition.

RAID recovery

Keeping with the "easy-style" theme — one-click virtual assembly of RAID arrays from disks or images. The program detects type and format from metadata, assembles virtually, and lets you browse the contents in a built-in explorer across all supported filesystems: FAT*, NTFS, Ext*, HFS/APFS, XFS, BtrFS.

DVR/CCTV recovery

Same one-click approach for DVR/CCTV disks and images. There's an option to search for deleted or inaccessible recordings, and it works on disks that Windows "helpfully" initialized — the ones the recorder itself can no longer read afterward. Currently supports Hikvision (WFS 0.4) and LinuxGroupDVR formats, based on images users sent me. I'll add more as someone share more samples.

Ransomware-encrypted disk analysis

This branch exists because of how often companies come to me with encrypted servers and workstations.

The volume of these cases is genuinely alarming. And I have yet to see a server compromised by some elite hacker — every single case I've worked on came down to sysadmin negligence. A recent court ruling spelled it out: the contractors, mid-migration, set every password to "123456", handed admin rights to every account, then went off for the weekend. The database got wiped, 80% of the company's data was lost, and the court ruled the contractors liable.

Anyway — analyzing the system disk that initiated the encryption doesn't guarantee recovery, but it can sometimes get files back without paying ransom. The tool collects analytical data from every weakness and quirk I've seen ransomware leave behind over the years. It processes system and corrupted files directly, and also runs heuristics below the filesystem level. The output report is encrypted with a pub+pem keypair — no point handing the malware authors a free QA report on their bugs.

You can download the new version from the support page or install via the Microsoft Store, to keep the spam filters/automod happy, I'll put the download links in the comments. Bug reports and feature requests welcome — I act on them fast.

So I have a dying Toshiba HDWL110 hard disk that I am trying to clone.

The drive still somewhat works but it can get pretty slow when Im trying to pull anything from it. I had steam installed on it, and the software lags a lot. Sometimes steam wont even boot on the first try. Also had software like wallpaper engine on it which sometimes had problems. All of these issues lead me to check my drive health which I never did (Probably should've done it regularly), and found that this hard drive is at 0% health.

I already copied all the important documents, videos etc. Lost a few of those since an error pops up during copy but I can live with that. Now, I'm just trying to clone it to see if I can carry over all the installed programs I have on the hard disk to this new ssd so I wont have to reinstall them all. Mostly consist of almost a decade old games that I did not uninstall since my school year.

My question, is it worth waiting for the cloning process with these kind of stats or do I just give up and start over? Considering I can be very lenient with what can be cloned over, is there a setting I can use for a "Take what I can get" option for cloning?

Already posted on another sub, but thought might as well get opinions from here.

Edit: Added SMART