Joel Taylor
ZFS Data Recovery: Deleted Files, Faulted Pools, and Unmountable Arrays
ZFS earned its reputation for resilience: built-in checksums, redundant metadata, and copy-on-write writes that never overwrite live data in place. That same design is also what makes recovery possible after events that would be terminal on other filesystems. Whether a…
APFS Data Recovery: When a Mac Won’t Boot or a Drive Won’t Mount
You go to power on your Mac and instead of the usual login screen, you get a folder with a flashing question mark, or a circle with a slash through it. You plug in your external drive and macOS tells…
Ext4 Data Recovery: Deleted LUNs, Corrupted Superblocks, and the Limits of fsck
The call comes in from an admin who has just discovered something missing. Maybe the host’s VM directory is suddenly half empty — production qcow2 files that were there yesterday simply aren’t there today. Maybe an iSCSI target on a…
Btrfs Data Recovery: When the Volume Won’t Mount and the Server Is Down
The call usually comes in around the same time of day. The admin opened a ticket because something went wrong overnight — a power blip, a kernel panic, a host upgrade, a controller reset — and now the server or…
Intel Optane Drive Recovery: When the Computer Won’t Boot and the Drive Shows as RAW
The typical scenario is something like this. The computer was working normally. A Windows update installed overnight, or a planned upgrade to Windows 11 completed, or the laptop was simply restarted after sitting closed for a few days. The next…
Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 SSD Recovery: Failed Drives, Common Symptoms, and Why Success Rates Are High
If you’ve gotten as far as identifying the Silicon Motion SM2259XT2 as the controller in your failed SSD, you’re already past the part of the diagnostic process most users never reach. This guide is for the case where the drive…
Seagate Drive Detected but Slow, Frozen, or Failing Mid-Copy: A Recovery Guide for Barracuda, Backup Plus, and Expansion Owners
A Seagate hard drive that’s failing outright — a drive that won’t power on, isn’t detected by the computer, or makes a clicking sound — is at least clear about what’s wrong with it. The Seagate drives we see most…
SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD Data Recovery: The “No Media” Failure and What We Do About It
If you’re holding a SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD — or a SanDisk Extreme Pro — and it’s no longer being recognized by your computer, you’re in a much more common situation than you might think. These drives have been a…
Laptop Hard Drive Not Detected: A Diagnostic Guide for Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, and MSI Owners
You press the power button on your laptop and something is wrong. Maybe the screen reports “no bootable device,” “operating system not found,” or “disk read error.” Maybe it sits at the manufacturer’s logo for far too long before throwing…