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Using Disk Drill 6 – A short (p)review again (2025)

Disk Drill fan boy This is not a full blown review, I am working on that. Instead this is a quick evaluation of features I’d like to see in any file recovery tool. A set of features that in my opinion make the difference between a serious data recovery tool and a typical quickly thrown… Read More »

Noteworthy JPEG-Repair updates..

JPEG-Repair 2.8.249 updates Drag & drop in file browser. The file browser is archaic and I know it. At the same time it’s quite intertwined with JPEG-Repair functionality which makes it difficult to ditch it and replace it by default Windows file open and save dialogs. I myself am probably the most frequent user of… Read More »

Recover deleted Bitlocker partition using DMDE

Last few weeks I stumbled onto several cases where file recovery software didn’t detect these deleted partitions. And even though these tools can decrypt Bitlocker partitions, they have to be able to find it first. I used DMDE. In one case DMDE detected the partition straight away, which is boring so I won’t get into… Read More »

Disk Drill 6 sneak preview (GoPro Recovery) + Discount

I was asked to try Disk Drill 6 beta, in particular I was asked to comment on the new Action Camera Module that was specifically designed to recover video data from GoPro, DJI action cameras, but also for example ‘normal’ Sony cameras. What’s so special about Action Cam videos? What makes them hard to recover?… Read More »

Sony Format Recovery: Recover Formatted Photos from Sony Camera

Common perception is that recovery of photos and video from a in camera formatted memory card is a matter of running a file recovery or photo recovery tool. Many makers of this type of software also give the impression it is this simple (Easeus, Stellar, RecoverIt, all the usual suspects). However many Sony camera owners… Read More »

And now I’m done with Steve Gibson (and SpinRite)

Is SpinRite a scam? Is S.G. a charlatan? People have accused Steve Gibson of being a charlatan and his SpinRite software of being little more than a scam. As you may or may not know S.G. is working on an update for the SpinRite DOS software, SpinRite 6.1. This has been a process that has… Read More »

Drives returning bogus data on failed reads

Some examples of drives returning bogus data after failed reads. Among data recovery engineers these are referred to as “mold” or “edu” sectors and they’re most likely parts of the drive’s S.A. or system area. Anyway, they have nothing to do with the original data from the failed sector.

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 »