cgsecurity.org

I am trying to use Photorec to recover digital photographs from my malfunctioning RiData 2GB Lightning Series SD card. I am not programming savvy at all, but have Linux and Ubuntu on my HP netbook and unfortunately got into Root Terminal a little too deep and attempted to change the SD Cards geometry (which I barely even understand what it is), and am not having much success. I fiddled with it mostly because I kept getting "Error Reading Sector" messages, and upon running TestDisk it recommended that the CHS and LBA numbers didn't match.

Anyhoo... I contacted Ritek to try and get the correct CHS and LBA parameters for this particular card, and am going back and forth but still the numbers have not been provided and instead they have recommended I send the card back to have the files recovered. I don't think that's a good idea, it's way beyond warranty, and I imagine they would not try as hard to get those photos as I would like. These photos are pretty important to me as they are 2 months worth of baby photos from my son's first year, so I really hope they aren't lost forever!

How do I obtain the correct geometry parameters for my particular disk? If I can't fix this myself, will a data recovery service be able to even if I don't have these numbers for them?

A wrong geometry isn't a real problem, the problem in your case is that all read operations failed. You will have to contact a specialized data recovery. PhotoRec can only work if most read operations work.