I have a flash drive with wedding photos which i can view the photos and videos when plugging the flash drive into my TV, but when I put it in my PC on windows 11 or even my iMac, it says the drive needs to be formatted, which would erase the drive. What should I do to recover the files without wiping the drive?

  • berahi@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    What is your TV model? Could it be that your TV runs Linux and your flash drive is formatted on a filesystem only fully supported by Linux, like say ext4? There are some 3rd party apps that can enable at least read-only access on macOS and Windows, or you can boot into a live USB Linux (with another USB drive obviously) and then copy the files into the computer.

    • bobbybigplay@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      actually just found out that samsung tv’s run on tizen, which is linux based. I ended up reformatting the drive and on EaseUS i can see that the partition containing the photos is there and although windows says its empty, EaseUS says most of it is used (~100 GB), and is also formatted in NTFS. Going to see if I can get these off, thanks for your help!

        • bobbybigplay@alien.topOPBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          thats what i initially thought (i went through with it knowing i have other family members with copies) but i can still access the files on my tv and I can see that the storage is taken up currently. still unsure how to get them off of the particular partition the files are in

        • dino_74@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          If you reFORMATTED it, then everything is gone.

          Reformatting doesn’t remove the data, it just marks the location where the data is as free. As long as something hasn’t overwritten it, you can still recover it.