Category Archives: data recovery

Can you detect a drive was trimmed by reading it?

Different flash operations (read / write / erase) have different power requirements. This is probably due to fact that an erase operation requires 4 times the voltage, about 20v, than what a read operation requires, about 5v. So idea is that power consumption gives clues about what a flash drive is doing. I am assuming the… Read More »

USB flash drive freezing – Optimal setup for disk imaging

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 »

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 »

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 »

Recover lost or deleted Bitcoin Wallet.dat using R-Studio

While this blog post covers my initial ‘research’, intention of this blog is to give an easier to digest guide into recovering or undeleting a Bitcoin wallet.dat file. Note that if you delete files or lose files due to formatting on a SSD, they are beyond DIY Recovery!! In that case you increase chances of… Read More »

Corrupted Micro SD Card freezes computer

If inserting a corrupted Micro SD Card, that you need to recover data from, freezes your computer, then this kind of puts you into a catch 22 situation. For recovery software to work the card needs to be detected and ID correctly. As long as it doesn’t you will be unable to recover your data.… Read More »

RAW file recovery and duplicates

Recovery is resulting in duplicate photos One of the drawbacks of ‘raw recovery’ is that generally files are recovered with auto generated meaningless filenames. To conclusively identify files you have to open them although initial culling can be done by sorting by size, or with help of a tool that can sort files by creation date,… Read More »