SD Card Recovery

Alex Baxter · Feb 12, 2017

PilotMan7700 said:
Project SD Card Recovery Complete!
I'm still a little perplexed about. The 35ish minutes of 4K footage is only about 16 or so gigs. The only thing I can think of is that I haven't formatted the card since I first got it. I generally just copy the files off the card and then delete them. :/

If you format the SD card and put it in your computer, then find 20 or 30 Gb of 'stuff' from the computer to copy to it, if it shows an error before completion, then it's a 'spoof' card, better off rid of it..

PilotMan7700 · Feb 12, 2017

Alex Baxter said:
If you format the SD card and put it in your computer, then find 20 or 30 Gb of 'stuff' from the computer to copy to it, if it shows an error before completion, then it's a 'spoof' card, better off rid of it..

You had me spooked a little but I just put 62.74GB of video on the card so it's definitely legit. I bought it straight from Amazon LLC, not a third party. I don't like to buy anything that's not from a reputable source. It had to just be that I hadn't reformatted it in a while. It was really kind of weird though. Before I formatted it, it showed that there was about 64GB capacity, 53GB free space, but 62GB used. All is well though.

ATXdrone · Feb 12, 2017

Don't want to make this a Mac vs. PC thing, but any response that says that the Mac is limited with respect to fixing things just isn't a power user. Windows has more tools you can buy for recovery, as it should, as 90% of the market has traditionally been Windows.

SUPER glad to hear it worked out.

I still say that removing it, IF YOU HADN'T WRITTEN TO IT WITH THE MAC was not the problem. Period. You can't corrupt a card without writing to it. Still, best to eject it properly (although I pull SD cards from my Mac without ejecting ALL THE TIME and have never had an issue). I would (a) not trust this SD card until you did a thorough test of it by reading and writing to it a few times (to near full). Also (b) SD cards are UNRELIABLE in general. Don't use it as your primary storage for videos. If you hook it up to your laptop/desktop, pull the data off it then. There's no reason not to do so. There's a reason that prosumer and pro cameras have dual SD slots: they copy all shots to both slots (mirrored writes) to ensure that you don't lose a day's worth of work.

By the way, I work in the storage industry (i.e. datacenter storage for servers) and have lots of OSes that I'm very familiar with, so I do know a thing about data, mounting volumes, etc.

PilotMan7700 · Feb 12, 2017

ATXdrone said:
Don't want to make this a Mac vs. PC thing, but any response that says that the Mac is limited with respect to fixing things just isn't a power user.

Well, I sort of started the Mac vs PC battle here

I made the switch to Mac just over a year ago, it's been a huge learning curve and I'm always up for learning new things on it. Is there something on the Mac that would have done the same thing that fixed it on the PC?

Sent from my iPhone using MavicPilots

ATXdrone · Feb 12, 2017

Mac OS X has the equivalent of chkdsk, but it was really not seeing much there, not sure if it would have helped. In the Mac world you normally stay in the GUI and the GUI failed to help you.

Here's an example fro the CLI . Use "diskutil list" to find the device (in this case /dev/disk3, in particular /dev/disk3s1 which is the actual partition) and then use fsck (in this case, fsck_msdos to deal with the FAT file system).

Code:

Bills-iMac:~ bill$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage FusionBootVG            121.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk1
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage FusionBootVG            2.0 TB     disk1s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk1s3

/dev/disk2 (internal, virtual):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            Fusion                 +2.1 TB     disk2
                                 Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2
                                 5711A928-5446-4C81-B8AD-B5E86D8D5BAD
                                 Unencrypted Fusion Drive

/dev/disk3 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk3
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME                 16.0 GB    disk3s1

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *512.1 GB   disk4
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Toshiba 512 Boot        511.3 GB   disk4s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk4s3

/dev/disk5 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk5
   1:                        EFI EFI                     314.6 MB   disk5s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS HGST 4TB                4.0 TB     disk5s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk5s3

Bills-iMac:~ bill$ sudo fsck_msdos /dev/disk3s1
Password:
** /dev/rdisk3s1
** Phase 1 - Preparing FAT
** Phase 2 - Checking Directories
/MISC/IDX/idx00 has too many clusters allocated (logical=136515, physical=8388608)
Drop superfluous clusters? [yn] y
/MISC/IDX/idx01 has too many clusters allocated (logical=138615, physical=8388608)
Drop superfluous clusters? [yn] y
** Phase 3 - Checking for Orphan Clusters
Free space in FSInfo block (392645) not correct (393147)
Fix? [yn] y
21 files, 12580704 KiB free (393147 clusters)

***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

alice123 · Feb 8, 2019

If your SD card got corrupted then you can try the different ways to get back deleted images, videos, audios, etc from SD card. However, there are some ways with the help of which you will be easily able to get back deleted data from SD card. However, you can also use SD Card Recovery to recover deleted data from SD card.

vaughan · Feb 19, 2019

PilotMan7700 said:
Project SD Card Recovery Complete!

I want to thank everybody that gave some really good advice and input on the matter. Ultimately though, it just came down to Mac being a crappy product for being able to fix a simple issue such as this. A buddy of mine had the same thing happen to him with his sd card out of his phone a while back and he just ran some sort of "chkdsk" in the cmd.exe through Windows on his PC and it fixed it. I was able to slide the card back into my computer and all my videos are there safe and sound. They have now been transferred to my permanent storage drives for safe keeping and editing in the near future.

It seems that I must have just whipped the card out before the computer had finished ejecting it. I was in a bit of a hurry but I thought for sure it showed that it was ejected properly. As for the card getting full before I finished my second battery, I'm still a little perplexed about. The 35ish minutes of 4K footage is only about 16 or so gigs. The only thing I can think of is that I haven't formatted the card since I first got it. I generally just copy the files off the card and then delete them. :/

Anyhoo, thanks again for all the input.

Here are the steps and a link to the procedure of what my friend did for anybody reading this in the future that is having the same issue.

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SD card recovery easily.

Use chkdsk to fix/repair a corrupted SD card without data losschkdsk
"chkdsk" command is your first choice for damaged SD card recovery. Requiring no format, it allows you to fix or repair a corrupted SD card without data loss. Now let’s look how it works. (I'm using Windows 7 for this demonstration)chkdsklook how it works. (I'm using Windows 7 for this demonstration)

1. Plug in your SD card to your computer with a card reader.

2. Go to the start menu, type in "cmd" in a search bar, hit enter and then you can see something named "cmd. exe" under a list of programs.exe

3. Right click "cmd. exe" and then you will get the following command windows that allow you to fix your corrupted SD card without format. Right click "cmd. exe" and then you will get the following command windows that allow you to fix your corrupted SD card without format.

4. Type in "chkdsk /X /f sd card letter:" or "chkdsk sd card letter: /f ", for example,"chkdsk /X /f G:" or "chkdsk h: /f".

Finishing all the steps, Windows will check and fix the file system of the SD card. It usually takes several minutes. After that, if you see "Windows has made corrections to the file system" in the command window, then congratulations! The damaged SD card is successfully fixed and you can access your data with ease. If not, you should try a third-party data recovery software to fix the damaged SD card and get back your data with an efficient damaged SD card recovery.

This is a great share. It's wise to use a data recovery tool to recover files on an SD card before the data is overwritten, but I don't think free stuff can do better than paying.