data recovery

Skyler's laptop drive crashed during the saving of a large file. Now the drive can't be seen by the computer. He tried seeing it in SpinRite and it doesn't see it either. Leo says that laptop had a so-called "fusion drive" which was half hard drive, half SSD drive. The technology was designed in a time when SSD drives were too expensive, and it really wasn't that great performance wise. It could be the spinning drive died, or the SSD drive died. Try rebooting into your BIOS and see if the BIOS sees it. If it does, then it could be a software issue.

Daryl has a hard drive that has bad bearings, and he needs to get the data off it. He's tried to have the board on the drive replaced, but now it says it needs the original board or ROM. How can he get the data off this bad drive? Rich says that at this point, only a data recovery service like DriveSavers will be able to get the data off it, and it's not cheap. Rich says that it's odd that the data company would require him to get the proper materials. He recommends going to another company.

Ricardo would like to recover some data from his phone, including his messages. How can he do that? Leo says that there's a program called ECamm PhoneView is the best one he knows of. It's Mac only though. Free to try, then it costs $30. What about Doctor Phone? $100 is really pricey, and it has page after page of one-star reviews. So Leo would recommend steering clear of that one.

Mark's mom accidentally deleted all the images on her Samsung Galaxy S5. They were able to get photos back with "Disk Digger," but what about the videos? Is there any way to get them back?

When Jerry turns on his Windows PC, all that comes up is a folder that says "Windows." Leo says it sounds like the hard drive has become corrupt and has failed. It can happen at any time, and the older the hard drive gets, the more likely it will fail. Can he get his data back? Leo says he can use recovery software to do so.

Steve's microSD card on his mobile phone has maxed out. It then overwrote a few files and now he can't read the disc. What can he do to recover the data? Leo recommends Recuva. The card may have just died on him, though.

Annie had a video file folder on her computer that disappeared. The folder, files — everything. Leo suspects that a disk error occurred and when it was cleaned up, it was removed. More likely, the folder entry in the file allocation table was removed. Chances are, the data is still on her hard drive, they just can't be seen by the OS. It's like losing a card in a library card catalog.

Bill broke his phone screen and wants to know how he can get his text messages off it? Leo says that if it's an Android phone, he can connect a USB cable to it and it will act as a drive so he can get the data off it. Here's an option from techpluto.com. But if he doesn't have screen access, it could be hard.

Earl accidentally deleted all of his vacation pictures on his phone. What can he do? Leo says that to guard against this in the future by using Google Photos, which will automatically upload his images when he's on a Wi-Fi connection.
Flickr does too.

With a little effort, Earl could use some recovery tools to restore them, but he'll have to make sure he connects his phone to his computer as a mass storage device. He'll be able to find that in settings.

Eric's daughter dropped her laptop and now it won't read her external hard drive. Has she lost all her data? Leo says not necessarily. What he suspects is that the cable, or the connector in the enclosure is broken. The drive itself is probably just fine since they are engineered to disengage when dropped.