Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

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bitcoin
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Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#1 Post by bitcoin »

my 64 GB Micro SD card that i use on my MP3 player recently has been having problems and now it says it needs to be formatted, just says "Removable Disk G:" in the file explorer

if i use Recuva it says "unable to read boot sector" and "unable to determine file system type" and there are Windows related error popups about the file system too

also tried to use Chkdsk but it says the drive has to be formatted

it has about 60 GB of audio files that i would like to recover, is there any way to do this?

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SYSTEM
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#2 Post by SYSTEM »

Unfortunately, the errors you're getting are extremely severe. It sounds like all the data is already gone. :(

Your best bet would be to contact a professional data recovery company, but that's quite expensive.
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bitcoin
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#3 Post by bitcoin »

SYSTEM wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2019 8:30 pm Unfortunately, the errors you're getting are extremely severe. It sounds like all the data is already gone. :(

Your best bet would be to contact a professional data recovery company, but that's quite expensive.
thanks for the reply, System

there's no way to fix or replace the file system with some obscure program without deleting the data?

thepiney
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#4 Post by thepiney »

You can try to view/recover the files on a Linux system or using a Linux Live CD/DVD. I've had mixed results but if nothing else works...

I have a WD My Passport 1TB that had the same issue (showed as a removable drive) for a couple years but didn't want to throw it out. I was able to restore it several times by using my laptop with LXLE 12.04 (Lubuntu based OS) and running "sudo testdisk" in a terminal, selecting the correct drive and restoring the MBR. The drive works perfectly fine but once in a while the MBR seems to get corrupted, especially when using it on XP systems and not getting "ejected" cleanly. If I ran the command without elevated priviledges "sudo" I didn't even see the drive listed.

Some of the Windows PE based and Linux live CDs/DVDs I use are listed here --> https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/v ... 19&t=15724

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Midas
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#5 Post by Midas »

FYI, the ultimate data recovery tool is in TPFC database but beware that it has quite a steep learning curve: TestDisk (https://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=1114).

Here's the oficial tool for formatting SD cards from the corresponding professional association: SD Formatter (https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/).

Piriform's Recuva (https://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=1139) and Bootice (https://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=2909) have also helped me in similar predicaments.

Having pointed the above, I also think you'd be better writing off that piece of kit.

bitcoin
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#6 Post by bitcoin »

thanks Midas and thepiney for the replies. I'll try some of those options.

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h3kt0r
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#7 Post by h3kt0r »

SD cards are made just for that. To fail and be replaced sooner than later.
Compact Flash cards are good for long term storage (10 to 20 years) but are soooo sloooowww...

vince77
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Re: Micro SD card - says it needs to be formatted - any way to recover data?

#8 Post by vince77 »

Yeah, SD Cards are outdated technology and the data transfer is very slow. But even after being corrupted, you can still recover some data from SD card using some file recovery software. Not all of the data can be restored though. I feel like cloud storage is the future.

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