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: USB flash drive freezing – Optimal setup for disk imaging »
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: Repair / Fix corrupt office documents (docx, xlsx) for free!! »
Big scary Raw SMART value, is my drive dying?! Seagate SMART RAW value calculator Submit Convert Seagate SMART RAW values for attributes: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 7 Seek_Error_Rate 195 ECC_On_the_Fly_Count to actual errors. These values are known to display huge numbers, often leading to unnecessary worries or even panic. The RAW values however represent both an event… Read More: Big scary Raw S.M.A.R.T. values aren’t always bad news! »
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: Sector reallocation on hard drives explained. »
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: Data Recovery Lab Success Rates. Are they worth anything? »
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: Tenorshare 4DDiG JPEG Repair?! »
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: How to recover data from corrupted RAW photos »
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: Windows Photos: It looks like we don’t support this file… »
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: Corrupt JPEG Files and how to fix them »
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: Repair a Sony RAW ARW photo (visual damage) »