This is a small tale about how a relatively ‘obscure’ and rare file format can be close to unrecoverable using existing tools. To refresh our minds we can basically recover files in two ways: File system based. This is always the preferred method as the file system allows us to determine the precise location of… Read More »
About this post This is quick write up about observations during recovery of an ‘unstable’ USB flash drive (pendrive, USB stick). This also in response to messages I pick up in various forums, where people struggle seeing how DeepSpar’s USB Stabilizer can help them improve disk imaging – while they do see how it’s a… Read More »
There are lots of tools out there that claim to be able to repair or recover corrupted Word documents (docx). Owner of this damaged document tried Kernel for Word File Repair and Repair My Word. Both failed. He also tried opening the file in various recommended editors such as Notepad++. The first hint to repair… Read More »
Big scary Raw SMART value, is my drive dying?! The other week I noticed this post on superuser.com: 4295032833, now that is a big scary number! That’s a lot of timeout errors! Does this mean this drive is bad or even dying? Then how come the normalized values seem to indicate that nothing’s wrong? Some… Read More »
I notice much nonsense online about bad sector reallocation on hard drives while in essence it is quite simple: Conditions for sector reallocation are: Non-recovered write errors When a write operation can not be completed after the Error Recovery Procedure (ERP) is fully carried out, the sector(s) are reallocated to the spare location. An error is… Read More »
What a data recovery lab claims .. Let’s look at the claim that Seagate makes for it’s data recovery services: Source: https://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/ironwolf/files/ironwolfpro-ds1914-5a-1707us.pdf, I took above screenshot at May 2021. 90% success rate, I call that pretty impressive. And what a data recovery lab actually recovers .. Then I read this interview with the manager of… Read More »
New (to me at least) JPEG ‘repair’ tool, Tenorshare 4DDiG. So I test it against files I know to be repairable. Success!, it says, go buy license. Let’s see: Compare size original files vs. what it repaired. Can’t be right. I see option ‘view logs’, *click*. Now we see what it did, it didn’t repair… Read More »
Repairing corrupt RAW photos (CR2, NEF, ARF etc.) There aren’t many solutions or even services available that actually and truly repair RAW photos produced by high-end digital cameras such as DSLRs from Canon, Sony and Nikon. Most software that claims this capability actually does nothing of the sort but in fact they simply extract JPEG… Read More »
Windows Photos: “It looks like we don’t support this file format.” The first thing you need to check is if other photo viewers can actually open the file. For example try the ‘old’ Windows Photo Viewer or a third party photo viewer. If those fail to open the photo as well, the file may be… Read More »
In this blogpost we’ll look at: A good JPEG as point of reference JPEG header corruption and how to repair Header + part of image data damaged and repair Corruption in JPEG image data resulting in visual anomalies JPEGs beyond repair that no one likes to hear about First things first, what is repair and… Read More »