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I had a 16G SD card in the card reader slot and an external USB HD connected to the USB port. The USB HD triggered a drive initialization (i.e. the drive had to be initialized by Windows before it can be partitioned). Somehow, when I told it to go ahead, it not only initialized the USB HD but also initialized the SD card, which was loaded with data. Now the SD's partition and file system are not recognized, not even by testdisk.exe. But I suspect the data is still there(?) I have another SD card that's identical to the bad one. When I ran testdisk on the good SD, I could pull out the partition information and saved it in the backup.log. Is it possible to load this info from the backup.log then write to the bad SD to restore its partition and file system, thus, regain access to all my data files? Please help!

Try PhotoRec, enable the expert mode in Options, start a recovery and choose a blocksize of 512 bytes.
Does it recover your data ?

I tried PhotoRec on the bad SD. It came up with the following info:

P UNKNOWN 0 0 1 1887 62 31 30318592

When I enabled Expert Mode and performed a Search, I chose the FAT/NTFS... (not ext2/ext3). It searched way beyond the size of the drive (30318592) to something over 50000000 and still going; I had to manually stop it. It found no data.

For comparison, I used PhotoRec on the GOOD SD. And the info is like this:

P FAT32 LBA 0 130 3 1887 62 31 30310400

I keep thinking if we can write the info on the GOOD SD to the bad SD, maybe we can fix it that way. I don't know I am on the right track or not... What was wiped out by the initialization anyway? Is it the partition info or more? Can any of the utilities you provided change this partition info?

You suggested changing the blocksize to 512, can you please tell me how?

If I duplicate my bad SD drive using something like HDDRawcopy, can your utilities work on this drive image? If so then I can experiment with the image until I solve the problem before applying the solution to the SD card itself.

When expert mode is enabled, PhotoRec will search for the first10 files and ask you to confirm the blocksize.
If you never had this question, it means the card has been wiped/zeroed and no data can be recovered.