- May 19, 2011
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A friend asked me to take a look at a problematic MicroSD card, they couldn't get any data off it.
I bought a new card reader (the card wouldn't be read through an SD adapter and connected to my printer (represented as a drive letter on my computer), which has its own MicroSD slot.
I managed to download a load of images (extremely slowly, 10MB/min!) off the card while the Windows event log filled up with messages about how it didn't like the card. The images are readable as well.
The friend gave me a new MicroSD card to store the recovered data from the old one. Initially, when I was copying the data to the new card (from my computer), it was going an order of magnitude faster, however while I had taken the precaution earlier of disabling sleep mode on my PC during the slow transfer, I had reinstated my normal sleep mode setting, and it went to sleep during the transfer.
When I woke the computer this morning I tried to restart the transfer. It took ages, and then kept saying per attempted transfer, "the drive is not ready". I tried physically disconnecting the card reader and trying the transfer again, no difference. I rebooted the computer, no difference. I powered down the computer, restarted it and tried again, no difference. I tried a full chkdsk on the card, nothing wrong. It could read images off fine though. As there was nothing else on the new MicroSD card, I decided to quick format it (exFAT, default settings, OS is Win7 64 SP1, up-to-date). The transfer is now going at about 1MB/sec (the chkdsk during the same session had peaked at 10MB/sec so I know it's not USB 1.1 related, no USB speed warnings either).
Has anyone had trouble like this before? At the point where I consider the old card to be finished with, I might try quick-formatting it to see whether it starts behaving itself, but I've never seen a storage device act so squirrelly until it was formatted yet pass full file system checks.
I bought a new card reader (the card wouldn't be read through an SD adapter and connected to my printer (represented as a drive letter on my computer), which has its own MicroSD slot.
I managed to download a load of images (extremely slowly, 10MB/min!) off the card while the Windows event log filled up with messages about how it didn't like the card. The images are readable as well.
The friend gave me a new MicroSD card to store the recovered data from the old one. Initially, when I was copying the data to the new card (from my computer), it was going an order of magnitude faster, however while I had taken the precaution earlier of disabling sleep mode on my PC during the slow transfer, I had reinstated my normal sleep mode setting, and it went to sleep during the transfer.
When I woke the computer this morning I tried to restart the transfer. It took ages, and then kept saying per attempted transfer, "the drive is not ready". I tried physically disconnecting the card reader and trying the transfer again, no difference. I rebooted the computer, no difference. I powered down the computer, restarted it and tried again, no difference. I tried a full chkdsk on the card, nothing wrong. It could read images off fine though. As there was nothing else on the new MicroSD card, I decided to quick format it (exFAT, default settings, OS is Win7 64 SP1, up-to-date). The transfer is now going at about 1MB/sec (the chkdsk during the same session had peaked at 10MB/sec so I know it's not USB 1.1 related, no USB speed warnings either).
Has anyone had trouble like this before? At the point where I consider the old card to be finished with, I might try quick-formatting it to see whether it starts behaving itself, but I've never seen a storage device act so squirrelly until it was formatted yet pass full file system checks.
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