Category Archives: Disk Structures and File Systems

Disk Structures File Systems are vital for an operating system to locate your data on a hard disk. A chain of pointers, starting at the first sector of your drive eventually points to individual files.

On disk structures

If photos can be recovered, I will.

In several places on this website I make the bold claim that I may recover your photos even if: File recovery or photo recovery software does not. File or photo recovery software recovers corrupt photos. Other labs can’t or recover corrupt files … Of course this is a claim you should not take my word… Read More »

When DIY data recovery is not a good idea ..

What’s wrong with using (DIY) data recovery software to recover data from an ‘unstable drive’? By unstable drive, I mean a drive that has problems delivering the data due to underlying physical problems. Physical problems that potentially get worse due to stressing the drive. Reduce stress on drive So, first goal is to reduce stress.… Read More »

Recover photos from a hard drive

When choosing the best photo recovery software it’s important to consider from what type of drive you need to recover from. To recover photos from a hard drive, in 9 out of 10 cases generic file recovery software will do better, give less fuzz and be quicker than specialized photo recovery software. In advance: SSD… Read More »

Recovering data from an unstable flash drive

Recovering data from an unstable flash drive often proves to be a lot harder than recovering data that was lost due to deletion or accidental formatting. This is due to the fact that data recovery software is written to address issues at the ‘data level’ while often instability issues are at the ‘disk level’. What… Read More »

Why is photo repair more expensive than photo recovery?

In this post I’ll try to explain why photo repair is relatively expensive compared to photo recovery. Why is it many photos can be recovered at a fraction of the cost of repairing just a few images?

Create a disk image of a SD Card or small USB flash drive

In this post I’ll explain how you can create a sector-by-sector disk image of a small USB flash drive or memory card using JpegDigger. This type if disk images are also referred to as dd or RAW image files. The disk image is an exact copy of each sector of the drive that was imaged.… Read More »

Accidentally deleted pictures from SSD. Recovered but they’re corrupted.

Case study, Story goes like: Accidentally deleted some pictures. Recovered them but they’re corrupted. Anyway to fix it? “I used Recuva to recover a good chunk of my pictures that were deleted but it seems that even though the file was recovered I can’t view its contents? Any program that helps with this? They were… Read More »

Unstable SD card with bad sectors data recovery – freezing, locks up, read errors, disconnects

Recovering your precious photos from a SD card can be challenging enough after accidental file deletion or formatting. Recovering data from an unstable SD Card may prove to even more difficult. Recovering data from an unstable SD Card Many file, photo and data recovery tools available focus on file recovery. Their efforts focus on discovery… Read More »

RAW data recovery

RAW can mean several things with regards to data recovery; ‘You can recover your RAW photos from a SD Card with a RAW file system using RAW file recovery’. With regards to file and photo recovery, RAW data recovery can refer to three different things: The recovery method; RAW vs. file system based recovery It… Read More »

You must initialize the disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it

When Windows Disk Manager does not find partitions it will display the message “You must initialize the disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it”. In other words the hard disk, SSD or removable device is “unallocated” or not partitioned. What does this mean and how do you recover your data if you need to?… Read More »