SD Card corruption

[Oscar1613]

My wife was taking some pictures today when suddenly the camera gave some write error message. Long story short, I took it out and put it in a USB SD Card reader with the read-only switch enabled so nothing gets overwritten, but my computer (Vista 64bit) says its unformatted. I've tried a bunch of freeware and demo file recovery programs, but they either say it's unformatted (RAW filesystem) or 1GB with no files on it (it's actually a 16GB card).

It wouldn't be a huge deal if we lost everything on there, but I want to make sure I exhaust all my options before giving up on whatever pictures we don't have copies of. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the partition table seems to be screwed up. It's been awhile since I've done anything like this, so is there any way to correct the file table so the file recovery software stands a fighting chance of finding the pictures?

 

[krose]

Try running chkdsk on the card. Open a command prompt and type "chkdsk /f X:" without the quotes, where X is the drive letter of your card.

 

[razel]

If Vista says it's unformatted, I don't think chkdsk will even 'see' it. Good call on keeping it read only. Try testdisk 1st which will try to recover the partition. If that doesn't work, run PhotoRec. Both of those programs aren't novice friendly, but they are EXTREMELY powerful.

Otherwise, there's also recuva.

 

[Oscar1613]

Yeah, chkdsk is one of the programs that doesn't even try because it says it's unformatted/RAW. I tried testdisk and PhotoRec, but both of those say it won't work if it doesn't detect the partition size correctly, and they both detect the partition size as 1GB instead of 16GB. I tried both anyways, and neither found a single thing. Then I saw an option in testdisk to override the detected partition geometry, and tried guessing at the correct CHS values to make it 16GB, but it still didn't find anything.

At this point, I'm wondering if maybe I should re-partition the card (without a full reformat) to at least get it functional, and then maybe the recovery tools will have more success locating the lost files? That seems like a pretty big gamble though, so I think it should probably be my last resort.