Author Archives: Joep

Sector reallocation on hard drives explained.

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 »

Data Recovery Lab Success Rates. Are they worth anything?

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 »

Tenorshare 4DDiG JPEG Repair?!

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 »

How to recover data from corrupted RAW photos

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

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 »

Corrupt JPEG Files and how to fix them

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 »

Repair a Sony RAW ARW photo (visual damage)

I long believed that it was close to impossible to repair visually distorted RAW photos. But a while back I was able to repair a visually distorted Nikon RAW photo (NEF) and now a Sony ARW RAW photo. What both these damaged files had in common though is that the portion of the file that… Read More »

Wondershare, Stellar photo repair tools, scams or ..

Observation: YouTube videos and ‘honey-pot’ articles on Stellar and Wondershare website addressing the issue of grey blocks in, or half grey photos. Example: In the video we watch the miracle happen, and a few clicks later the files are repaired. Well, let me tell you, that I have tried the same with numerous files and… Read More »

File system corruption and USBC folder and files..

This is a quick write up after some initial research into occurrence of sectors that start with the string USBC or 0x55534243. These are common cause for data loss and can be hard to recover from. I think I see why data recovery software is often unsuccessful as these sectors appear to be ‘inserted’ causing… Read More »

USB Stick kapot – Gegevens redden

Ze zijn zo handig maar ook zo kwetsbaar, USB sticks. Om gegevens uit wisselen, de delen, op te sturen. Om je gegevens altijd bij je te hebben ongeacht op welke PC je werkt. Maar zoals gezegd ook kwetsbaar! Kwetsbaarheid USB Sticks USB Sticks zijn kwetsbaar juist als je ze veel gebruikt (maar het tegenovergestelde is… Read More »