How to fix or restore files lost due to corrupted partition, data disk failure or CHKDSK? Best harddisk recovery tool

Last updated: 20200216

Summary:

The best tool to restore and get all your files from the lost/corrupted partition is: EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard.

Period. It’s so good I even paid US$149 for a lifetime of upgrades. (NOTE: it’s for 1 computer only it seems, had difficulty running the software on another computer with the same license)

Disclaimer: This is NOT a paid article. I’m not affiliated even. I just need good tools to get back important data files, as that’s part of my work.

And you can use the Free version of course, but after I saw the files that it can restore, I knew I should support this software.

I’ve personally spent US thousands of dollars on lost data, and hiring experts to restore damaged HDD drives.

What it can do:

  1. Find missing files on a failed drive or lost partition.

  2. Restore lost partitions, names, files and even folders and structure!

There are about 4-5 other programs that I tried, and they are not even close. Some attempt to deep scan for 1 hour for my 256GB SSD drive, others can restore files but cannot get the names right.

Some can get files and names right, but it loses folder and path info, placing all files in 1 big folder – that’s really useless for me, my programs and work will not work.

How?

Make sure you do not write or force a CHKDSK on your drive when you see partition failure or missing files. You don’t want to risk overwriting any files.

If you are trying out various programs to restore files, choose to restore files TO ANOTHER DRIVE. It is very important to restore to ANOTHER DRIVE.

What happened?

So I have an SSD that suddenly started automatically running CHKDSK during a system restart.

And that was it, the files in the drive are no longer accessible and when accessing the drive from Windows File Explorer, it says:

X:\ is not accessible.

The disk structure is corrupted and unreadable.

 

Thank you so much Windows. So I had to research ways to fix it.

I googled and started trying:

  1. MiniTool Partition Wizard, and used Data Recovery.
  2. Recuva
  3. Stella

I must admit MiniTool Partition Wizard is a great software, if you want to copy, resize and upgrade your SSD or HDD drives. It is incredible for resizing! But when it came to data recovery, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is king.

MiniTool manage to list and restore all my files without their filenames.

Recuva managed to list and restore all my files, with their filenames, but without their folder structure -they were all in 1 large folder.

Stella took 1 hour and hung when trying to restore my SSD.

 

Let me know if my advice worked for you, or other tools you tried.

How to manually transfer images from iPhone to an external disk or drive on Mac?

Step 1: Connect Your External Hard Drive To Your Mac

First, connect the hard drive to your Mac and make sure it shows up in the Finder’s sidebar. Copy something to the hard drive from the desktop just to make sure it works. If it doesn’t then it might not be formatted to use with a Mac (most external hard drives aren’t). If that’s the case, you’ll need to first reformat the hard drive to FAT format.

Step 2: Connect Your iOS Device To Your Mac

The first thing you need to do is connect your iPhone or iPad to your Mac using the USB to Lightning connector you got with your device.

Step 3: Launch Image Capture

Image Capture on Mac is one of the most underrated utilities. To launch it, search for “Image Capture” using Spotlight search (using Cmd + Space shortcut).

iphone hard drive photos backup 1

After you launch it, find your iOS device in the left sidebar and click on it.

iphone hard drive photos backup 2

You’ll now see a list of all the photos on your iPhone or iPad right there.

You can either use the keyboard shortcut Cmd + A to select all or just individually check mark all the images you want to import.

Step 4: Select Destination

By default, photos will be imported in the Pictures folder. Click the drop-down, and select “Other”.

iphone hard drive photos backup 6

Now select the folder in the external hard drive as a source.

iphone hard drive photos backup 3

Step 5: Click Import

iphone hard drive photos backup 5

Click the “Import” button and wait until the transfer is done. If the external hard drive is USB 2.0 spec, and you have a lot of photos, this could take more than just a couple of minutes.