Recovering data from an SD card

Calahonda52

Card in a Samsung phone, unreadable by windows and Mac and an android tablet, phone says its wrong format, wants to format it: It showed 1,642 fotos on it with a X on the phone before I took it out.
Any suggestions to try recover them please?.
Thanks as always

ps: Just to say: the SD card is not registering on with Windows 10 or Mac

[move if wrong forum]

editorsean

I would suggest giving PhotoRec a try, which is free. It ignores the file system, so will attempt recover anything that it determines to be a picture, document, etc. I have seen this recover files that commercial software missed, especially on corrupt FAT and FAT32 file systems that memory cards and USB flash drives under 32GB typically use.

The following is a rough guide how to use it:

1. Download the TestDisk package (link) and extract the file somewhere handy, such as a folder on your Desktop.
2. Insert the memory card in your PC's memory card reader. I suggest disconnecting any USB flash drives, etc. as this will make it easier to identify the memory card in the utility.
3. Run 'photorec_win' inside the extracted folder.
4. If it brings up a User Account Control dialogue window, select 'Yes'.
5. Using the up/down keyboard arrow keys, select your memory card from the 'Disk \\.\PhysicalDrive' list going by its size, e.g. '16 GB' if it's a 16GB SD card.
6. Press the right arrow key twice to select 'Proceed' and press 'Enter'.
7. Press the up arrow key to select 'Whole Disk' and press 'Enter'.
8. Leave 'Other' highlighted and press 'Enter'.
9. Press 'c' and leave it a while to carry out the recovery process.

If it recovers any files, it will show them as something like 'jpg: ### recovered' and these will be placed in the folder you extracted the TestDisk zip file to. From my last recovery, it placed the recovered files in the folder 'recup_dir.1'.

As it bypasses the file system, it will often not recover the file names, so if you titled your pictures or had documents on it, you will need to check through all.

Calahonda52

Thank you very much for the detailed instruction,
Followed them:

Don't have a card reader on the windows machine,
E:, drive where the card is in a USB drive, is coming up not accessible.

I saw elsewhere that if I reformat the sd card in the fone, that I may then be able to recover the files?
SD card showing up blank when inserted in one.