Can I recover my data from this corrupted SD Card, or have those photos been forever banished to the land of wind and ghosts?
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s not panic and trust the process. Deep breaths.
So, how did I get into this mess? Well, ironically enough I thought I’d be responsible by copying the photos I’d taken by the halfway point of a recent trip onto my phone as a backup, rather than carting around a laptop only for that purpose. I’d brought this USB-C SD card reader for just such an occasion, but before leaving I’d only tested so far as seeing that it recognised the card and was showing up in a file manager app.
On trying it out for real, it showed up as expected, then disconnected after a few dozen seconds, then reconnected. After that happened twice more, I distinctly remember thinking “this is not healthy for the SD Card and could corrupt it, I should stop”. I also remember thinking stubbornly to give it one more try and, well, it corrupted the card.
My next thoughts were not suitable for a family audience.
The card stopped being recognised on the phone, and popping it back in the camera reveals it can’t read it either, and would like to format it again.
I don’t know much, but I know enough to not do this, and thankfully I had another card to use for the rest of the trip. Still, I don’t want to lose those photos, so let’s see if we can recover them.
Normally I’d use the tools in Hirens Boot CD for recovering data, but in the interests of screen capturing it for video, let’s find some common or garden Windows tools.
The first step should be to create an image of the card to work from, so we’re not further damaging the original with any of our poking and prodding.
I referred to the particularly useful data recovery software subreddit’s wiki pages, linked in the description, and from their list of recommendations I’ve installed UFS Explorer, which has a free demo that should do what we need.
It installs quickly enough, although we do need to perform this additional DRM installation or maybe reinstallation to get the demo version working, which is a bit odd, but easily rectified.
We’ll get the SD card transferred over from this betrayer of data integrity into a reader that’s earned my trust over years of service, and get it plugged in to the PC.
The PC recognises the card, but as with the camera, cannot read the file system. Again, don’t format it. That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do. UFS Explorer is having a bit more luck in reading the card though, and it recognising the old disk name of LUMIX is an encouraging sign.
Right clicking the 128GB disk and clicking on “save disk image” gives us the tool we need, and I’m pretty much just accepting its defaults and saving it to my C: drive. It reckons it will take an hour or so, so I’m letting it do its thing while I go out grocery shopping.
I return to this screen, which says it’s done and is reassuringly green, but also says total bytes copied is zero, which is a concern. At least there’s a128GB file where it ought to be, and the log file doesn’t show any errors.
Let see if we can get any data from it. Returning to that subreddit wiki, it recommends a few recovery program, but R-Photo seems the most fitting for this use case.
It installs in much the same way as any other piece of software, and while it does seem like it would be able to attack the card directly, let’s heed our own advice and open the disk image on my NVMe drive.
Gratifyingly, that’s pretty much all I have to do, as it automatically starts reading the files and even making preview images for them. Cue a massive sigh of release.
The most complicated part of the process turns out to be locating the select all checkbox, and now we simply have to save them back to disk.
With that, the SD card can be reformatted and I’m sure it will be functional for many more years.
As for this card reader, I’m probably going to introduce it to a hammer for a gentle massage session, although to be completely fair, I’ve not ruled the phone out as the culprit either. Investigations are ongoing.
That’s all for this emergency session of data recovery and the normal service of aimless tech buffoonery will continue next week, but until then, if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.