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.
Scott has a Samsung Galaxy S6 and he's deleted some text messages on Verizon and then tried to recover them, but they haven't showed up yet. Leo says that Verizon keeps copies of his text messages, so if anyone has them, they do.
Adam's laptop hard drive became unreadable when a battery failure happened and he needs to get the pictures off it. Leo says that since the hard drive can still be accessed, he may be able to get them back with a recovery software utility. Piriform Recuva is the one that Leo recommends. The key thing, though, is to never write to the drive again until he manages to get the data he needs off of it.
Julian needs to recover files from his Mac. Will Recuva work? Leo says that EaseUS is what he uses for Mac, and it's free.
Matthew has a USB key, and while the computer sees it, he can't open any files on it. His backup is no better. Leo says that a USB thumb drive can get corrupted just like any drive and the good news is that he can recover it with software. It's probably just a corrupted file catalog and that can be fixed. He should right click on the USB key, select properties, then "scan and fix errors." He can also run Scandisk.
Paul has an LG G3, took his memory card out, put it on another phone, and now it won't mount. Leo says it's probably a format that isn't read because the other phone is older. Now he can't get the data because the older phone damaged the card. Leo says that he can get a program that can read it called Recuva which is free. That should be able to get the data off. PC Inspector will also do it.
Gary put Windows 7 on an old XP machine. Leo says it was designed to upgrade from XP, so that should be just fine. He tried to alter the partition and now he doesn't have access to his photos. Leo says ideally, Gary should've backed up the photos first to an external drive. But once he repartitioned the hard drive, all the data was erased. There are two kinds of portioning: destructive and non-destructive. It sounds like Gary used the Windows partition utility which is destructive, and the photos have been erased. That's why backing up is so crucial.
Wally has a corrupted SD card and while he can get videos off it, they can't be played. Leo says that if the video file isn't complete, there's a good chance he won't be able to play it. There may be software that can rebuild the corrupted video, but what he really wants is to get every bit of the data off every sector. Leo uses Recuva by Piriform. It's very good. Then, open the files in VLC Video Player. It's the least vulnerable to file corruption issues.
