SD Card problem

[#1]

My son's phone stated that he had used 75% of the memory, did he want to transfer the content to his 64GB SD card? He replied Yes, and the transfer process started. Part way through, the phone battery went flat. Now the phone no longer has about 2 years of photos in the memory, and the SD card says it needs formatting.

We are assuming the photos have been moved to the SD card. If that is the case, do any of you know a way of recovering the SD card so that its contents are not wiped, please?

Thanks for any help

[#2]

I've used various tools over the years, the one I've got now was a paid for job, bought after freeware failed. I managed to junk an entire 16Gb card of photos, it brought 99% of them back. If you do a search online, a fair number of apps / progs come up. You can read the reviews Give the freeware versions a stab first though. Some are quite good but like I put above, you might have to shell out. If they are any good they will show what is recoverable on the card, disk etc as a matter of course.

I ended up with Active File recovery and even though I haven't used it that much, it is a handy thing to have around -- even more so if you take lots of photos.

[#3]

I know this is of little help now, but my suggestion is to copy the photos to your PC/laptop (or even better, an external HD) on a regular basis.

I still use an actual camera, rather than mobile or tablet, for the great majority of my photography, but have known a couple of times when the card has malfunctioned/failed - but because all photos have been copied to externals I have only lost a few, and fortunately they have been 'almost' repeatable shots.

[#4]

My thanks to @idonno  and @jab1 . I will take a look at the web.

[#5]

@idonno ,

I've found some free s/w that might help - I'm not sure the forum rules allow me to quote their name. It says I need an SD Card Reader which I can connect to my pc. From your experience of having done this sort of recovery before, can I use my son's phone as the SD Reader? I should be able to connect the phone to my pc. If not, what do you use as a reader?

I also have less than 64GB of space on my pc hard drive, same problem on an external hard drive, so can I do two goes at this recovery so that I can split the locations the recovered files go to? I realise this may be dependant on the recovery s/w I use.

Cheers

Graham

[#6]

I've not had this problem, so I can't help too much.

I assume SD cards have a FAT table like hard drives do. That might have gotten corrupted meaning you can't see anything even though you might have some files there.

I would put some software which can store an image of the SD card - then you know in its broken state you won't lose anything else or make it worse than it is.

There must be software which can rebuild and show you what is on the card. Someone who knows this better than me may be able to recommend something.

@penneck I don't suppose the mods or PlusNet will come down on you for recommending software (though they can correct me).

After all it would be pretty pointless having a "Tech Help - Software/Hardware etc" forum if it were against the rules to mention software by name. 

[#7]

@penneck    Have a go with  "Recuva" ....

https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva

[#8]

@shutter ,

Thanks. I'll try Recuva. I've got other ccleaner s/w so I think they should be good. Now I need to get a USB2-to-SD Card Adaptor, and my son's SD card. Both may take a few days, so forgive me if this post goes quiet for a while.

Regards

[#9]

No worries @penneck 

Hope it all goes well, and post back and let us know how you got on.

It will help us here, and I need to use my Digitial SLR this weekend as going away. SD Card also.

Should be fine, but I need to check it tonight and of course charge the battery. So I need some good luck.

[#10]

@Alex ,

Yep. Good luck. Hope your weekend is good

[#11]

---

@penneck wrote:

@shutter ,

Thanks. I'll try Recuva. I've got other ccleaner s/w so I think they should be good. Now I need to get a USB2-to-SD Card Adaptor, and my son's SD card. Both may take a few days, so forgive me if this post goes quiet for a while.

Regards

---

Can you "link" the phone to computer?    not sure if Recuva will work with "remote" connection, but may be worth a try .....

[#12]

---

@penneck wrote:

I also have less than 64GB of space on my pc hard drive, same problem on an external hard drive, 

Trying to recover a 64 GB USB memory stick with so little available memory could be an issue. I would free up more memory on your PC before starting. If you run short of PC memory you’re at risk of having another issue to sort.

---

[#13]

@penneck You may want to have a look at this:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/12425/windows-10-free-up-drive-space is you have Windows 10 or https://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/ is you have Windows 7

On Windows 10 you can recover huge (GBs++) amounts of space.

[#14]

---

@penneck wrote: From your experience of having done this sort of recovery before, can I use my son's phone as the SD Reader? I should be able to connect the phone to my pc. If not, what do you use as a reader?

---

Its not something I'd do. I use an external multi card USB docking station, something like  this   But they come in all shapes and sizes nowadays. Only problem with running out of space is it will grind to a halt. I wouldn't use a phone as the link. USB is slow at the best of times when it comes to doing this stuff.

What have I got in the docking station? A hard drive. Hard drives are cheap nowadays, £40 will buy 500Gb to 1TB....£25 - 250Gb. You really need to make space, although you should be able to scan the SD card. But it does need somewhere to recover the files to. I just recover from the SD card straight to the hard drive.

I can only agree with @jab1, I back up to lots of places nowadays, cloud, hard drives. Once you've had a loss, its something you tend to end up doing. Even if the majority of photos aren't how you want them. Good luck.

Edit, linked to the wrong device. Changed.

[#15]

@shutter ,

I've freed up enough space on my external hard drive. My son then turned up unexpectedly, and I got not only the SD card but also an SD card reader, so I installed the free version of Recuva, plugged in the SD card and reader, and then spent 5 hours running Recuva on the SD card. From the word Go, it said it had found 285 files, so spent all but the last couple of minutes of that 5 hours running Stage 1 of the recovery. At the end, all I had was some global file of about 770kBytes, so quite what happened to the 285 files is unknown.

Any suggestions?