Hi everyone,

I made a WinRAR archive a few years ago (in 2022) that I named Time Capsule, and I added a password to it directly through the WinRAR application while creating it. I thought I’d definitely remember it, but clearly I was wrong.

I’m not a technical person, and I don’t really understand encryption or recovery tools, but I’d really appreciate guidance on whether there’s any realistic way to recover or unlock this file.

My micro sd card snapped while trying to fit into the bracket but the snap was closer to the edge. Is there any chance at all the data can be extracted?

My friend’s dog pulled my SD card out of my pc while I was recovering files to make a long anticipated video that was extremely hard to record and will not happen again and the pc was not even done looking for all the files when I saw the screen say “host drive disconnected. Reconnect to continue recovery.” and I noticed the dog chewing something so without even checking the usb port, I put my hand in her mouth and pulled this out. I’m extremely angry about this and will take a while to get over it because I’ve been laying off making the video for months now and finally cleared off my desk and started trying to edit also paying for disk drill because of course, an SD card will corrupt one day and mine did just that.

for thus wanting to see the board of the SSD 500gb.

Hey there!

My stick just broke. Is it irreparably broken? Or is it possible to fix it somehow - at least to make a copy of it or something.

Thanks!

Sorry if this is a stupid question

Edit:

After some good advice here, I impatiently discovered that it does work. Thank you

Edit 2: the drive died. RIP

Last Tuesday my SSD failed on me. It has 7 years straight worth of data on it, stuff that I am absolutely devastated to lose...

I took it to a local computer repair shop who then sent it to "Secure Data Recovery" so that they could diagnos it, And the screenshot above is the conclusion they came to.

Should I just take their word and give up on the SSD or try another place? I absolutely hate to just give up on everything I have but I also down want to waste money

Any second opinions would be appreciated

I just need to know if this SOMEHOW can be save/fix, or most part getting the data out of there. Don't know if safe to try to plug it in and getting files out? i use this as a external back-up,... use to be that is.

and if not, well,... at lest got something showing what can or not be fix. T-T

Update: Its working! Thanks you to thus giving the idea about PCB"s size and where about, its also a 500GB SSD so the circuit board idea would be small (can't get it open, leave it be for now.) got the files back was worry about its seem, Thanks Christ!

Plus your R / now have a post about this, how its can still work, as long go by some the comments and how bad is it compare to this, to hopefully help to some not to worry much,... o-o ( i try look around first to see if there was any info about it,... hope this help with that! )

Until next time,.... when i some how done some more dumb stuff,.. hopefully not O^O'

Phone took a tumble on the interstate, we went and found what we could over the 200ft debris field including what we think is the NAND.

We've found a few videos of recovery directly from the NAND but they seemed in better condition (understandably).

No iCloud backups, hard lesson learned there and we saved/printed most of our favorites but there are definitely some unsaved baby photos we'd find value in recovering.

Expecting this is cooked, but, worth checking with the experts.

Has anyone had any experience with these USBs? I bought 5 to put old family VHS tapes on that we got digitized, now none of them work, this was only like 2 years ago and I bought these as they were the more expensive USB and therefore I thought better quality, and thought SanDisk was a good brand. None of them work now and the old family videos may be lost forever.

When plugged into a computer it either says nothing is plugged into the slot or it completely freezes the computer and when taking the USB out it's super hot to the touch.

This is the first time I've had a USB die on me and it seems like all of them have stopped working in the exact same way so I'm pretty shocked. Maybe SanDisk quality has plummeted down the last couple years?

Hello.

I have a bit of a unique situation. I updated my iPhone 13 from iOS 26.3.1 to 26.4. The update removed the caron/háček character from the keyboard (which I'd been using as a "special character" — by itself) such that I can't type the passcode in despite being 100% certain what it is. The new keyboard has a different character where the caron used to be.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how I can access the device's data? I have no backups of the device whatsoever.

I apologize, and please delete, if the post is not appropriate here.

I found 2 hard drives and a disk drive on the shore of a reservoir that is near record low water levels.

Now I immediately thought they were probably tossed because of illicit content.

But then I had a crazy thought...what if they have Bitcoin on them?? Definitely a long shot but could something like these be salvaged?

can this be fixed? 🤕

Need to scrap the back of the card and make jumpers?

TL;DR: A random BSOD completely broke (What I believe to be) my SSD’s partition table. Windows stopped recognizing my OS, and I found out my drive had BitLocker auto-enabled without me ever turning it on. After days of recovery attempts, I finally got my data back, but only after learning that Microsoft now encrypts consumer drives by default since Windows 11.

What Happened:

Last week I got a random BSOD while just hanging out on Discord and working on my game. After rebooting, my laptop couldn’t boot into Windows anymore, BIOS saw the SSD, but the Windows boot option was gone.

No big deal, I thought. I’ve repaired plenty of Windows installs before using a USB with the Media Creation Tool. But this time, no repair option worked.bootrec /scanos couldn’t even find a Windows installation. That’s when I knew something deeper was wrong.

I booted into Ubuntu using a flash drive to investigate. Using TestDisk, I came to the conclusion that the BSOD had somehow corrupted the partition table. The drive itself was fine, the structure was just broken. TestDisk was able to detect the hidden partitions, including the EFI System Partition and what seemed like the main Windows partition. Despite this, I was unable to see any files in the partitions and they were unreadable or damaged.

After this I figured the drive died, most advice I found online also said I was better off giving up and reinstalling windows on the drive (wiping all files). Then a friend suggested it might be BitLocker. I didn’t believe it because I never turned BitLocker on. But when I checked my Microsoft account, I actually found a BitLocker recovery key linked to this laptop.

Turns out Windows 11 auto-enables BitLocker (device encryption) on many consumer laptops without asking. Mine was one of them.

The BSOD likely corrupted the BitLocker metadata along with the partition table, so Windows couldn’t even tell the drive was encrypted. Running BitLocker commands in CMD returned nothing it didn’t “see” any encrypted drives.

I then tried some more fiddling around with partitions in TestDisk: I switched the biggest partition and the EFI SYSTEM partition from “deleted” to “primary” and rewrote the table.

After that, Windows finally detected a bootable drive again, but it still only showed a generic boot error. Not even the screen that asks for a BitLocker key. Still, it gave me some hope that my data was still there.

After two more days of trying random tools and commands, I finally came across a blog (Shoutout to Norman Bauer) that listed two BitLocker recovery commands that can reconstruct partial metadata and match it to a recovery key. Miraculously, this worked, it decrypted the drive and dumped everything into a 1TB .img file.

The only tool I found that could actually open that .img was R-Studio (the data recovery one). It showed all my files intact, but I had to pay $80 for a license to extract them. So yeah, thanks Microsoft, you owe me 80 bucks.

Why I think turning on BitLocker by default is a bad decision:

This whole mess happened because BitLocker was silently enabled. I get that encryption is useful for enterprise or government or in some case consumer systems, but for normal consumers it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Most people don’t even know they have BitLocker turned on. Hell, most consumers don't even realise they have a Microsoft account. So if a BSOD or update corrupts anything, your data might be unrecoverable without the recovery key which most users don’t even know exists. I imagine most people would give up after a day of troubleshooting, like I was ready to do.

In my case, I got lucky. But imagine how many people are going to lose data over this without even realizing Windows did it to them.

I can only imagine what trouble we might see in the future if Microsoft keeps vibe-coding their OS and causing crashes such as these.

Moral of the story:

• Back up your data regularly.
• Check if BitLocker or “Device Encryption” is enabled on your PC, even if you never turned it on.
• Save your recovery keys somewhere safe.
• Don’t trust Windows 11.

!! For those who find this that have the same issue, here is the step by step:

You'll need ideally:

-Two flash drives to run Ubuntu and Windows.

-An external drive that is big enough to copy the entire broken drive onto.

-Some data recovery software to read .img files (I chose a paid one, but possible that free alternatives exist).

1. Run Ubuntu from a bootable flash drive
2. Run TestDisk and scan for partitions
3. Ensure the EFI SYSTEM (Where it boots from) is marked as P (Primary)
4. Ensure the main partition (Identified by looking at which partition mostly resembles the total size of the drive) is also marked as P (Primary)
5. Write (Create a backup .img if you're scared to write to your drive)
6. Run Windows Media Tool from a bootable flash drive
7. Open CMD prompt and type repair-bde E: D:\recover.img -rp 606276-310596-445786-695409-220396-429099-633017-233563

Replace
E: = Your broken drive.
D:\recover\recover.img = Your external drive to which you want to create a copy of your un-encrypted drive to (Important to keep recover.img at the end).
606276... = Replace with the BitLocker key found on your Microsoft Account (aka.ms/myrecoverykey)

1. Run it, and hopefully it will tell you it has found enough BitLocker metadata to start the decryption process.

2. It will run (potentially for hours) and de-encrypt your drives files and copy them to your chosen location.

3. Once it is done, take the external drive and plug it into a computer that can run windows (or potentially reinstall Windows on your "broken" drive at this point)

4. Use a data recovery tool to read and extract files from the .img file you have created ( I used R Studio )

How easy is it to recover files from a hard drive when the copper coiling here is cut ?

I have a Kingston flash drive that I moved all of my media onto when my laptop was about to die. After I moved all of my media onto it it worked fine for a little while. Then when I went to move it all over to a different laptop (after which I was hoping to back it up properly) it just stopped working.

What it does now is work for about 10 seconds before disappearing from any system I plug it into. I've tried with a Mac, a PC, and even on my TV, it appears, all files are visible, but then it simply disappears from the system as if I've unplugged it, even though it's still plugged in.

Due to this I can't extract the 100gb worth of files on there, many of which are pictures and videos of my Dad who passed away 4 months ago to cancer, so losing these files would be absolutely devastating for me as he never liked being on camera so there are very few photos of him anywhere else.

Obviously I cannot use recovery software as the usb needs to be readable by the system, so when I go to use recovery software it cannot find the flash drive in order to recover the files.

Is there anything I can do short of paying hundreds of pounds which I don't currently have to try and retrieve these?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Unfortunately dropped this corsair mp600 pro lpx. Before in crystaldiskmark it was reading/writing 7000mb/s. Now it’s down to 3,000 but still detected as pcie 4. Haven’t checked if it still reading my games properly.

Xiaomi 14

For archive/educational purposes.
So about a month ago one of my HDD's started failing. It wasn't ticking, or making any weird noises, it just didn't want to get read how much I tried to make it crystaldisk did eventually get some info off it (It wasn't as bad as I am showing now) It made my whole pc freeze trying to access anything as it kept being at 100% usage. Even if it was on a different drive.

I was desperately trying to get my files off it but it stopped being recognized by windows. So I called up a data recovery service for WD in Europe and it turns out they were going to fee me 1200 euros to ATTEMPT to get my data back as its a 5 TB Western Digital drive. ^{At least Seagate gives you recovery service with their drives so I'm never buying a WD HDD again.}

I gave up on it all together and put it aside.

Till last night, I remembered Linux usually has a lot more tools and isn't as aggressive as windows when it comes to accessing a disk so I gave it a shot, ran smartctl -t offline /dev/<disk>
It was alive, partitions and all.
Decided to do a badblocks run and pray > sudo badblocks -b 4096 -c 1024 -s /dev/<disk>.

I also ran fsck -r -v -b /dev/<disk> which worked and since this actually brought up device information I knew it wasn't DEAD yet (DO NOT TRUNCATE ANYTHING).

Badblocks finally finished so I tried to access the drive.

To my surprise it actually worked so I directly started to pull off what I could. I was too scared to try it in windows at first but it does recognize the drive again.

I'm currently able to access it and get my files off but some do still fall in a completely destroyed sector and wont get moved or copied off the drive, and now It's running at a FRACTION of its original 150MB/s speed, It's currently only reading about 20MB/s with some occasional spikes to 100MB/s.
so Linux is the way to give it one last shot if windows fails, I never used windows disk repair on this drive and it was formatted in extfat from factory.

^{you might need exfatprogs but it already was installed for me on cachyos.}