Straight-forward articles covering crashing hard drives, missing files and how to prevent making the problem even worse — all articles are created by the in-house engineers that have been recovering crashed drives and files for years.
The one thing you can do to protect a clicking or failing drive from further damage is to immediately turn off power and contact us. Turning the power back on to a failing hard drive is what usually turns recoverable data into lost data.
Clicking, disappearing, dying or death — these are the most common issues with hard drives and what to do for each issue.
APFS changed how many recovery solutions will work. Check if snapshots exist, check containers, and check for encryption prior to purchasing any solution — also learn which solutions may fail.
Is the device company owned or personally owned? Answering that resolves most BitLocker lockouts. There are six locations where the 48-digit recovery key resides, and what happens if it is truly gone.
Buffalo NAS units run standard Linux storage with the OS on the member disks. What that means when one fails, and why the box is often the…
SSDs fail without warning because SMART reports wear, not controller health. What actually fails, and why a dead SSD beats a working one.
Mechanical, electronic, firmware or logical — four failure classes, how to tell them apart yourself, and which two get worse while you decide.
A corrupted card is not deteriorating — only writing destroys it. What corruption usually means, why exFAT is fragile, and three free checks first.
There are four factors which will determine how much money you have to pay, and the volume of data recovered has nothing to do with the amount. We present published UK figures, we suggest four questions to ask any company claiming they can help, and we explain what happens when a recovery fails...
Software reads the disk; this is good news as long as the disk itself isn't going out — but otherwise, this is disaster. Here are four questions to help determine if software can be helpful in recovering your lost data — and here are three scenarios in which software wins ...
Rather than a star rating, here are four criteria that will help you find a tool that works best for your particular problem — and the times when no tools will be able to recover your lost data.
Apple's Genius Bar will diagnose and replace broken hardware. The bad hard drive leaves with the old parts. Recover first then fix second … plus three …
The options for resetting vary greatly as to how much data it will delete — and on an SSD, one of those reset options can be unrecoverable in just minutes.
There are free recovery software programs that really do recover data in some circumstances. Where these limits generally are located, what to look for prior to downloading/installing, and when no free program will be able to recover any lost files or folders.
Before you give up and think the drive is dead… Four steps using free tests that can tell you if the issue is with Windows or the drive itself; why each Windows error message indicates something different about the problem. And why we would advise against "shucking" a WD external hard drive.
Hitachi took over IBM's hard disk drive business and eventually became HGST before Western Digital acquired it. And with that comes a legacy for each of them when they arrive at our door.
The number of good reads a failing device has left is limited. There are four stages, four levels of failure in the different components of a drive which can fail, and there are four honest limitations as to how much can be done.
Data recovery restores files. Forensic work verifies no alteration occurred. Write blockers, SHA-256 hashing, and chain of custody will be discussed.
Do not rely upon "Good" or "Caution". Use Reallocated Sectors Count and Pending Sectors instead — plus what SMART cannot tell you.
Wear from usage on an SSD is reported by SMART attributes. However, controller health is barely reported at all. The attributes which report useful information and those that don't will be discussed here.
The failure of an array is not something which will deteriorate further — the potential for harm is due to what actions are taken after the failure. Five things not to do with your RAID system; five key details to document as soon as possible; how your disk layout is derived.
Deletion deletes the directory entry referencing the file. It does not delete the file itself. If the disk is a mechanical one, deleting a file has no effect on the physical location of the file on disk. When the disk is an SSD, TRIM allows deletion of the file within minutes. This article discusses four ways to check if deleted files can be recovered without paying someone for their service.
After a hard drive is recognised by a computer system, there are some recoverable items which can safely be attempted by yourself. Where that boundary exists, what is safe to try to recover on your own, and what you need to watch out for when using Western Digital drives.
Media made by Iomega has been around for many years. A lot of times it's the only copy there is. What remains, what "click of death" was about, and what today's…
LaCie units range from a single external drive you take with you to multi-disk RAID units — and on the RAID units, the operating system resides on the disks.
Maxtor merged with Seagate in 2006, so those Maxtor drives have been around since then. What's left working and why the "initialise disk?" prompts are the biggest deal here.
Four different possibilities for "I cannot get access to my files." Only one possibility is a file/data issue. Two quick checks to identify which side of the problem the error is, and three actions to avoid.
The computer started normally but found nothing to boot from. The four causes for a situation where there is no operating system to be booted to; three free tests; and how likely it is that none of your data has been touched.
A RAID 10 can survive multiple disk failures under the right conditions. A description of how RAID 10 works; what kinds of disk loss will cause a RAID 10 to fail; and why these failures do not produce an error message.
A stalled RAID rebuild or one that fails tells you exactly what is wrong. What does each type of rebuild failure mean; and why trying again after failing will cost you money.
There are four totally different states in which a hard drive may be referred to as dead and each state provides its own set of possibilities. When you determine which state your hard drive is in, you will know if there is any possibility of recovering data on the failed disk.
Four places to look for lost photos: card, phone, PC, or cloud. Four different answers. How do recovered pictures lose their file names, yet still show up in the same photo order as when you took them?
Many Samsung SSD models are encrypted by default. The Samsung Magician utility can also make your failing drive worse. What should you be checking before attempting data recovery; and what do the controller fallback states mean?
Three different types of products all with three different methods of recovering lost data. We've seen several reports of portable SSD failures in 2023, and we'll discuss what these issues indicate.
Seagate drives have large amounts of firmware stored in a service area located on the platter. If this firmware is damaged, it can cause a number of problems with regard to data recovery. In addition, we will describe the behaviour of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) in relation to failed drives, and explain the older problem referred to as the "BSY" lockup.
The drive will be failing long before you notice it — it usually just looks like an ageing computer. The symptoms listed in the order they occur, and the two that require immediate action.
Toshiba produces many OEM laptop hard drives. Most users therefore use Toshiba without even realising it. This can affect both failure patterns, and availability of suitable donors.
Flash sticks cannot be repaired and returned to you working. In addition to discrete versus monolithic design, each symptom has different implications. And then there's the fact that flash is not...
There are three characteristics unique to Western Digital drives that impact recovery from those drives – and one of these characteristics makes shucking a WD external drive a dangerous decision.
A Windows account that has been given permission to decrypt an encrypted file using EFS that was encrypted by another user. Who is a data recovery agent, why does one exist, and why do most organisations discover they never set one up?
A hardware wallet will store its key on a secure chip designed to be resistant to being extracted. How the seed phrase represents the only way to recover your wallet.
A clicking hard drive indicates the disk read/write heads are retracting and then trying again and again in a cycle. What different sounds mean, why the freezer trick won't work for you, and what recovery actually involves.
A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error means a bad checksum occurred but doesn't tell you why. Four types of causes – ranging from mild to severe – and three non-destructive checks, and why chkdsk /r is the wrong instinct.
NTFS is telling you about its own accounting system, not your files. How a whole directory can disappear; and why when you run chkdsk, it will delete things it cannot account for.
This message is a report, not an instruction. What every variant of the message means; why clicking on it will destroy your directory structure; and how it's really fixed.
The name given by NTFS as to which specific structure has failed. What is a Master File Table (MFT); why does location matter in determining if you'll be able to recover something from there; and what exactly happens to the damaged segment once you run chkdsk on it.
Comparison data of speed are all over. A better way to ask the question is how each failure occurs; how much warning do you receive before the failure occurs; and what may be recovered after a failure?
The mirror protects you from a single disk failure. However, the mirror does not protect you from deleting data, corrupting data or having a rebuild go wrong. What goes wrong with RAID 1, and why…
There is no parity in RAID 0 so nothing can be computed back. So how do people recover? It's a physical job and not an arithmetic one.
One disk fails, the rebuild begins. Then the second disk fails during the rebuild. What can we compute back? And what needs to be fixed before that?
Backup = copy. Disaster recovery = plan for resumption. Most business organisations know how to make a backup but assume they are doing disaster recovery.
QNAP stacks its layers (mdadm/LVM/thin pool/ext4), and each layer fails differently. What does this mean for data recovery? Why is this appliance being taken out of service?
The disappearance of an entire drive from your BIOS when there was still life remaining in it is typically a controller failure, not due to wear. How do you check, and what kind of risk exists with updating your firmware?
When you can safely DIY, and how to get deleted files back without making things worse.
Higher-stakes recoveries — failed arrays and solid-state drives — explained simply.
The brands we mostly come across are Seagate, Western Digital (WD), Toshiba, Samsung and SanDisk. What to do after your drive has failed.
Reading about it only gets you so far. A little information or a phone call, and we can provide an honest assessment along with a complimentary diagnostic test. With most jobs, there is no charge if the recovery fails.