Questions tagged [data-recovery]

This tag is for questions about techniques for recovering lost data — e.g., from deleted files and/or damaged or corrupted digital media. Please review the tag wiki before posting a question. Do not explicitly ask for tools or other products; such questions are off-topic on Super User.

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DISKPART.EXE - Clean wrong disk [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How to recover data from re-partitioned hard drive I made a terrible mistake. DISKPART.EXE select WrongHarddisk Clean What is the best way to recover my data or restore the ...
LaPhi's user avatar
  • 432
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

Service for retrieving data from old Macintosh floppies

I have a bunch of old Mac floppies, from whatever System was common in 1995. I've been wanting to get this data off of these floppies for some time but feet dragging has led to the current state ...
dash-tom-bang's user avatar
4 votes
5 answers
772 views

RAID recovery - planning for the worst

I've considered getting a commercial RAID NAS, e.g. QNAP or Synology but hesitate because I want to be absolutely confident regarding disaster recovery. I'd prefer not to be at the mercy of the ...
Pengin's user avatar
  • 287
4 votes
2 answers
6k views

Recovering Thunderbird mail after a Windows 7 upgrade

I installed Windows 7 over Windows XP and forgot to backup my emails. I still have the Thunderbird profile folder saved in Documents and Settings though. How do I go about recovering all my mail and ...
Libyano's user avatar
  • 53
4 votes
3 answers
5k views

unable to recover data on a dynamic disk

I had a computer with two 3TB HDDs that were Dynamic Disk mirrors of one another. I'm trying to recover data off of one of them without success. So I plugged one of these 3TB HDDs into a USB3<->...
neubert's user avatar
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4 votes
1 answer
765 views

SSD Wear-Leveling and Fragmentation

I'm trying to understand the effects of wear-leveling on fragmentation in SSD. To be more specific, when the SSD controller decides to allocate a noncontiguous block to a file because of wear-leveling,...
OSM10's user avatar
  • 73
4 votes
1 answer
13k views

How to automatically recover lost file extensions?

We're recoverying bunches of data from a crashed partition of which we had no backup, using a data recovery software. Files are getting recovered, but file names are lost. Is there any software or ...
Áxel Costas Pena's user avatar
4 votes
4 answers
1k views

Correcting tree from messed up file tree in NTFS partition

It's a real messed situation, but I'm quite at the end of my options. It's my personal hardrive, so it's very important for me, and yes, I have no backup =( The short story: I have two discs. One ...
gl00ten's user avatar
  • 526
4 votes
3 answers
103 views

View all USB Drive contents at once

I have a corrupt DOCX file on my USB drive. Looking at the raw code of the corrupted file, the text has nothing at all to do with the file that it should have been. It's text from a file that was on ...
Steven Jenkins's user avatar
4 votes
5 answers
2k views

Recover data from physically damaged harddrive. What are my options?

I was trying to replace the power supply in my desktop PC and ended up physically damaging the data connection from the hard drive to the motherboard. The plastic shelf for the copper prongs on the ...
Michael Kniskern's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
20k views

An abnormal high pitch sound is coming from my hard drive

My hard drive is making a high pitched sound. And it has now for a few months, however in the past week or so the sound has gotten worse. What surprises me is that my laptop is not even a year old. I ...
Timothy's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
5k views

How to get data from a VirtualBox .vdi file?

I have wrongly removed the parent snapshot of a virtual machine so that I cannot recover the latest environment. VirtualBox shows me info similar to below: Parent hard disk with UUID {943bb73f-15cb-...
Cipher's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes
1 answer
9k views

How to detect corrupted files? [closed]

I messed up recovery of a corrupted HDD; part of the hard drive now has corrupted random files. I can't go manually through each file and open it, so I'm looking for a way (software?) that will tell ...
Kwan Blue's user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
5k views

Undelete an "rm -r" on an exfat external hard disk device

There are several questions about how to undo an rm -r command, however in this specific case I have an exfat formatted partition / hard disk, rather than, for example, and ext4/ext3 formatted disk. ...
user3728501's user avatar
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4 votes
1 answer
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ddrescue stuck on scraping bad blocks... (forwards)

I have a Hitachi 640GB laptop hard drive that has some bad blocks. I don't believe the blocks are physical bad blocks, because the drive doesn't make any clicking noises. The hard drive is formatted ...
Guy Noir's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
16k views

How do I recover information I've typed into a website after I accidentally lost the information?

I typed a good amount of information into a form while in Safari, but I never bothered to save it and when I pressed to submit the data there was an error and I lost all the work I had done. Is there ...
I'm_With_Stupid's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
49k views

How to fix HDD malfunction which gives rapid beeping noise and it's not recognized by PC?

I have a 1TB Seagate External hard drive. Upon trying to plug it in to my TV today, it would not load and told me it was "empty". So I tried to plug it in to my computer, at this point it started ...
Troubled's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
6k views

Will writing a new partition table change anything other than the first 512 bytes

I'm trying to recover data from a 1TB drive removed from my NAS, but when I run fdisk -lu /dev/sdb I get a message saying that there's no valid partition table. From what I understand the partition ...
HuggieRich's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
24k views

Accidentally deleted ALL Chrome cookies while trying to view some

I was trying to view the cookies in Chrome and perhaps delete them for a specific site. I tried to click the search box to enter some text to view just the cookies for the specific site, but ...
Synetech's user avatar
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4 votes
1 answer
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Recovering data from a RAID 0 array

I have an Intel software RAID 0 setup with two 500GB disks (i.e. "fakeraid"). The metadata on one of the disks has been lost and so the array will no longer activate. I know the order of the disks, ...
user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
2k views

Gimp file recovery

I need to recover some gimp files (*.xcf) from a damaged partition. I've tried testdisk to no avail. I have been able to recover files with scalpel. The process for doing this is by uncommenting the ...
Gruzzles's user avatar
  • 675
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

Purging Expired SQL Server Backups

I have set up a SQL Server Agent job to execute a backup every night at 3am. The job appends the backup to an existing backup file, and sets the expiry of the backup to expire in 7 days time. It's ...
BG100's user avatar
  • 195
4 votes
2 answers
526 views

Can I recover a rm -rf-ed Mercurial repository?

I made the mistake of wiping out my entire project directory with a quick "rm -rf project". Of course, the .hg directory went with it. I had about 15-20 changesets, that I have not pushed to anyone, ...
K. Norbert's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
2k views

Lazarus Form Recovery for Safari?

I use Lazarus a lot on Chrome and FireFox. Well, not a lot, but it's great for crashing when you're writing something online in a form that doesn't automatically save what you're writing. Plus, this ...
cregox's user avatar
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4 votes
1 answer
1k views

My folder turned into a 'USB***' file

A folder (not the disk itself) containing misc. things in my flash drive turned into a single USBC[]ÇNY file when I was running the Sublime Text app. It has no modified-date, nothing, looks like ...
user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
3k views

Archive (.tar.gz) Corruption

I've got a .tar.gz archive that has definitely suffered some kind of corruption. The data inside the archive is obviously very precious to me and I'd really like to get my hands on as much as possible....
Mythical Juggernaut's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
785 views

Recover lost video file/stream from an NTFS filesystem

I recorded an online video conference using CamStudio. Unfortunately when it reached 4 GB CamStudio suddenly warned me it couldn't save the file (because of its size or something) any more, then ...
hbasser's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes
2 answers
4k views

How can I recover my email (in Thunderbird) from a failed hard drive?

My Windows hard drive failed and now I can not boot into Windows. I have very important emails addressing financial information and must recover them! I've been able to boot from disk into Ubuntu, ...
kevin's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes
0 answers
700 views

Will data remain intact when flashing the firmware of a “bricked” Intel SSD 520 Series SSD drive?

My Intel SSD 520 Series 240GB SSDSC2BW240A3L SSD featuring the SandForce SF-2281VB1-SDC controller spontaneously died and does not show up in BIOS. Presumably, its firmware has been corrupted by a ...
Semnodime's user avatar
  • 402
4 votes
0 answers
2k views

Recover files from "partition" with DCF file system but without disk letter

I'm trying to recover lost data from a complete blackout on my photo camera (strictly not a superuser question but I'm trying to solve the issue with my laptop). So I have a camera (Canon 7D, compact ...
1010011010's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
265 views

Why is my 500GB hdd not readable after dd'ed on a different 500GB hdd?

Accidentally formatted an important external 500GB hdd yesterday. Not an SDD, 2.5". (Quick) formatting occured while installing windows xp on it. I had the wrong usb drive plugged in. ~600MB are ...
panny's user avatar
  • 665
4 votes
0 answers
3k views

How do I repair/recover "RAW" usb drive partition?

Something happened to one of my USB drives. When I connect it my computer, Windows thinks that it's "RAW", and asks me to format it. But it should be FAT32, and chock full of files. I looked in ...
mcandre's user avatar
  • 3,036
4 votes
2 answers
4k views

Undelete records in Microsoft Access

About 600 records in a Microsoft Access File (.mdb) have been deleted. The .mdb file size hasn't changed, being around 20 MB. AccessFIX (Demo) shows the exact number and contents of the deleted ...
Acro's user avatar
  • 41
4 votes
3 answers
1k views

USB stick no longer recognised

I have an 8GB Transcend USB stick which - as of yesterday - is no longer recognised as such. When I plug into a USB port it shows as a new drive but clicking on the drive in Windows (XP) Explorer ...
paoloricardo's user avatar
3 votes
3 answers
1k views

I accidentally wrote to /dev/sda1, then I did it to /dev/sdb1

My knowledge of Unix systems is patchy at best and when it came down to copying things to a drive I attempted the commands cp ./files.files /dev/sda1. At the time I was copying a tar ball that was in ...
user avatar
3 votes
6 answers
4k views

Is data on RAM memory recoverable?

Imagine you're working on your computer and suddenly the electricity goes out is there a way to recover the data lost in this case?
ehsan0x's user avatar
  • 1,062
3 votes
5 answers
5k views

Why can't ddrescue just recover blocks used by the filesystem?

It seems that ddrescue tries to recover all blocks on a disk or partition, even ones that don't contain files. Wouldn't it be possible for it to find out which blocks actually hold files by looking at ...
eggbert's user avatar
  • 179
3 votes
6 answers
2k views

Recover data from hard drive with partitions (but not most data) overwritten

I have a 500GB hard drive I've been keeping around to recover data from that I removed from a failing NAS drive that got sort of... erratic at the end. I finally got rid of the NAS when during a ...
Macha's user avatar
  • 5,312
3 votes
4 answers
1k views

Why can Linux systems sometime recover data Windows can't? Any concrete reasons?

Background: Earlier this year I had a problem with a SSD drive that Windows would not recognize anymore. But eventually a bootable "Parted Magic 2012-10-10" did the trick. See this solved thread. One ...
Philip Allgaier's user avatar
3 votes
4 answers
3k views

Data recovery on a data HDD (no OS)

I am helping a family member with a dead hard disk. It is a seagate 200Gb 3.5" HDD in one of those old-school external enclosures. The problem was that windows failed to detect the hard disk when ...
aCuria's user avatar
  • 691
3 votes
3 answers
18k views

Can HDD Platters be interchanged between different HDDs

Can HDD platters theoretically be interchanged that one could recover data from a HDD in which something else might be damaged? I am interested if it is technically possible, whichever effort is ...
inf's user avatar
  • 2,759
3 votes
3 answers
213 views

External Hard Drive reformatting and data

I have an 100Gb external HD with bunch of stuff that was originally formatted to windows XP. I now have a mac and want to re-format the external to work with my Mac but dont want to lose the valuable ...
Greg's user avatar
  • 31
3 votes
1 answer
92k views

Recover Unsaved Notepad Files [duplicate]

My computer rebooted when I wasn't home and I lost several very important notepad files. Is there any way to recover them? Anything?
user353817's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
16k views

Recover files deleted from Windows 7 with no backup

I accidentally deleted important files, for which I do not have a backup. My thesis files worth four years of sweat is gone and when I tried to go back to a "previous versions" I get the message: ...
Jeon-Ho Aaron Cho's user avatar
3 votes
5 answers
10k views

Coffee spilled inside computer, damaged hard drive

Today coffee spilled over my table, and some of it (very less) reached the PC case placed under the table. I think little bit of it got inside the PC case through the front. As that happened the fan ...
user avatar
3 votes
4 answers
1k views

Expectations for NTFS file recovery

Yesterday I booted my XP system, and as I looked up a minute later I saw the light blue screen and tail-end of that pre-boot diskcheck Windows sometimes does if it finds an error (or was previously ...
Fred Hamilton's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

Can you effectively wipe a hard drive from the current Linux OS?

I have a laptop that is barely alive. The screen is busted. The power cord is frayed. The power indicator flashes red sometimes. Etc. So I want to wipe the hard drive as effectively as I can before I ...
Mike Pierce's user avatar
3 votes
3 answers
982 views

How do I access a hard drive from a computer where windows is deleted?

Here is the current situation: My cousin deleted Windows from his hard drive (yeah, don't ask...). His hard drive still has about 200 GB of files on it that he may want to recover before we format ...
Brandon's user avatar
  • 213
3 votes
3 answers
1k views

Recovering data from external hard drive with hard drive enclosure

So I spilled water on my WD Essential 1.5 TB hard drive. I think it is just the enclosure that is affected so I bought a Rocketfish hard drive enclosure. Now when I connect it to the computer it ...
Jordan's user avatar
  • 33
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

Why do files deleted with the command prompt not end up in the recycle bin?

Also, is it possible to recover files deleted with the cmd prompt?
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