cgsecurity.org

Hello,

Yesterday the mounted SD card in my phone decided to get unreadable. I attempted to do some file recovery and came across some weird behaviour.
If I plug in the card with an USB-SD reader into my laptop, it won't recognise it at all, it does however in my main Computer. When plugging the drive in, it loads realy slowly, chkdsk says it cannot be used for RAW formats, so I'll assume the partition is broken.
When running either testdisk or photorec with the drive plugged in it needs approx 20minutes to even load in all my available physical drives, but eventualy gets me to the recovery options for it. It displays the partition correctly at 63GB/59GiB named "P unknown", but when attempting to recover files it takes forever to make any progress.
I left photorec running through the night, and it has indeed recovered a few .dll files, but the estimated time for completion just goes upwards, its at 2500hrs now.
Any ideas what exactly is broken on my SD card? Any tipps on how I could speed up the recovery process?

Try to clone the SD card using ddrescue, see https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Please tell us if you get better performance

I created a SystemrescueDisk and tried to clone the drive.

When trying to list the drives using fdisk, it takes a long time to even attempt to show me that the drive is plugged in, and then doesnt even show up. There was no use in trying to use ddrescue as it couldnt find the broken medium.

Gparted took a long time to load available devices aswell, gave a few error messages about input/output errors on the device, but eventualy showed it as a physical device with an unallocated partition. It gave me no options to copy/delete/format the unallocated space.

A bit more background info:
Photorec ran for about 50hours and only reconstructed a few gigabyte worth of weird .dll files, all the same size, with a 2060 creation date.
Any other program I try to use to list my partitions/drives in both windows or a linux distro started from USB or even CD loads forever while the drive is plugged in, and if it shows the drive, it shows it as unallocated space with no options to do anything.

dll are associated with windows programs and are usually absent from SD card.
If you have the same problem with another card reader, contact a data recovery company.

I tried two diffrent card readers on 3 diffrent computers, to no avail. I guess the card is just dead now. A bit sad, but a few holiday photos are definately not worth the money for a professional recovery.

Thanks for the help tho.