SD card showing as corrupted - any way to recover files?

[Stg-Flame]

A few days ago, my girlfriend's SD card in her phone said it's no longer formatted and asked if she wanted to format it (which she didn't). A handful of pictures are visible but the vast majority of them are not showing up. Is there any possible way to recover the files? We have a USB adapter but due to work, I won't be able to look at it myself until I return home in a few days but I'm hoping I can get some advice until then.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Update: So I plugged the adapter into my PC and I can see everything just fine, but it's hit or miss as to which files will open and which will just crash the card. I'm hoping they can be recovered since there are some pictures and videos of recently deceased family members she really wants to get back, but if they can't be recovered, is there any way to tell which ones aren't corrupted? There's thousands of pictures and videos on this card and it will take days (if not longer) to check each individual file, especially since if I try to open a corrupted file, it crashes and I have to reinsert the USB adapter and wait for it to be recognized (which I can't imagine is good for the USB or my PC).

 

[SirCanealot]

Don't have an answer, but I recently had a 128GB Micro SD go south (luckily I think I mostly lost some pictures of cats, haha)

I used Windows 10 and eventually ended up cutting and pasting all of the files off the card at once — Windows 10 on my work laptop would try for a few minutes per file to access it. After that it would present an option to skip or cancel. It allowed me to select 'do this for everything else', so I did manage to get all the working files off the card eventually (obviously took hours since it takes a few minutes to skip over a corrupt file). But if you have Windows 10 you should be able to leave this running over night at least...

Good luck!

 

[Nashemon]

The way I used to connect my HDDs up to my PC (like eight hard drives daisy chained through external docks, through a single USB 2.0 port lol) used to result in folder corruption issues all the time. Sometimes it would be the root, so as soon as I clicked on the drive it would display the corruption error. Other times it would just be a folder.

I spent many hours and lost a lot of content downloading every file recovery program under the sun. None of them worked as described until I found "GetDataBack Simple". It has saved me many times since then. So that's my recommendation. I've never personally tried it on an SD card, but it's worked on everything else. Might need the FAT version for an SD card. There is a demo you can download to test functionality with your case.

https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

 

[Stg-Flame]

Don't have an answer, but I recently had a 128GB Micro SD go south (luckily I think I mostly lost some pictures of cats, haha)

I used Windows 10 and eventually ended up cutting and pasting all of the files off the card at once — Windows 10 on my work laptop would try for a few minutes per file to access it. After that it would present an option to skip or cancel. It allowed me to select 'do this for everything else', so I did manage to get all the working files off the card eventually (obviously took hours since it takes a few minutes to skip over a corrupt file). But if you have Windows 10 you should be able to leave this running over night at least...

Good luck!

Still chugging away with Windows 7.

The way I used to connect my HDDs up to my PC (like eight hard drives daisy chained through external docks, through a single USB 2.0 port lol) used to result in folder corruption issues all the time. Sometimes it would be the root, so as soon as I clicked on the drive it would display the corruption error. Other times it would just be a folder.

I spent many hours and lost a lot of content downloading every file recovery program under the sun. None of them worked as described until I found "GetDataBack Simple". It has saved me many times since then. So that's my recommendation. I've never personally tried it on an SD card, but it's worked on everything else. Might need the FAT version for an SD card. There is a demo you can download to test functionality with your case.

https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

I'll definitely look into this. Thanks a lot.

Was it able to recover or repair any corrupted files in your case?

 

[Nashemon]

I'll definitely look into this. Thanks a lot.

Was it able to recover or repair any corrupted files in your case?

Yes, 100% in all but one case. Only got 99% in that one. Of course your experience may vary, so give it a try with the demo first.

But from my understanding of the way computers work, I don't think the files were actually corrupted in most cases. I believe the pointer to the files, or a major part of the table of contents was somehow corrupted, so it lost where some of the files were actually located on the hard disk. The files themselves, or at least 99% of them were still fully intact on the hard drive, which is what the program can scan for.

It has 4 (maybe 5) levels of scanning. With level 1 being the quickest, and the one I use most often. If it doesn't find what you're looking for, progress to the next level. I've had to use level 4 once before, and that's the one I lost a handful of things. The files opened, but their contents were wrong or glitchy. There's also a box at the bottom to see deleted files and folders. They are marked with strikethrough text.

The program does all the hunting for you. It will show you the identical folder structure that you're used to seeing in Windows. No guessing what files are due to loss of file names that other recovery programs seem to do. You just choose the files you want to recover that it finds, and tell it where to copy them. Of course, as with all recoveries you have to make sure you choose a drive that is not the one you're recovering from, otherwise you will most certainly be writing over the data you're potentially trying to recover.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Ok, so now I've run into the same problem. Any time the program tries to access the SD card, it acts like it unmounts the removable drive. The program won't detect removable drives, so I had to select Image Files and when I had it check a single picture that I know is corrupted, it just told me to Insert Disc into Removable Disc.

Any ideas on how to proceed? I'm not sure I could copy the files onto one of my HDDs since it would do the same thing and try to access the corrupted file, which would unmount the thumb drive.