Will Ascenzo
Will is the lead blogger, copywriter, and copy editor for Gillware Data Recovery and Digital Forensics, and a staunch advocate against the abuse of innocent semicolons.
WD My Passport Hard Disk Not Accessible
The client in this data recovery case had a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive. The drive had been working fine, and they’d filled it with home videos and family photos—your usual irreplaceable stuff. Then one day, as the…
Deleted Photo Recovery Case Study: How We Recover Lost Files
The client in this data recovery case came to us after 34 gigabytes of photos had been deleted from their laptop. Once they had realized the amount of data they’d lost, they removed the solid state drive from the computer…
Recovering Missing AJA Video Footage
AJA’s Ki Pro video recorder looks familiar to anybody who remembers the halcyon days when we recorded audio and video on magnetic tape. But instead of storing data on tape, the Ki Pro opts for the much more modern hard…
NTFS Data Recovery: Windows 10 Downgrade Problems
After trying out Windows 10, plenty of people ultimately chose to back out and return to their old OS. It’s not hard to see why—early adopters have run into all sorts of issues over the past year and a half,…
Server Crash Recovery Case Study: Lightning Strikes Twice
The client in this data recovery came to us after their local fire department suffered a server crash. A lightning strike to the station had led to a power surge. Afterward, the little two-drive server the department relied on to…
Laptop Data Recovery: Disk Not Initialized
You plug in your hard drive — maybe an external drive, maybe a laptop drive you removed and connected through an enclosure — and Windows Disk Management shows it as “Not Initialized.” A dialog box appears asking whether you want…
Windows File Recovery: Recovering from a Reinstall
It happens to the best of us sometimes. You reformat your PC’s hard drive and install a nice, fresh version of Windows on it. You get a little bit of that figurative “new computer smell” back in your life. Life…
Recovering Photos from PNY SD Card That Won’t Read
Memory Card Photo Recovery: How to Recover Pictures from an SD Card Think of your SD card as a long, sandy beach. Imagine each file living in that card is a tiny bit of metal—a wristwatch, or a coin, or a…
HDD PCB Repair: More Than Meets the Eye
The client in this data recovery case had been storing their company’s Peachtree financial database on an old Seagate Barracuda hard drive. Eventually, as all hard drives do, the old Seagate hard drive installed in the client’s computer gave up…