Help recovering erased SD card from Samsung phone

[civvie]

Hello,

My Samsung S8 phone and SD card were accidentally erased (a 'find my phone' mishap).

Many photos and videos were on the 64GB SD card.

I ran a scan with photorec and it saved a few 'recup_dir' folders to my computer.
In one of them is a 'f0044800.sqlite' file that is 64GB big.

I don't really know what I'm doing and if the scan was successful or not, or what to do with these files if so...
Can anyone give advice or point me towards a simple how-to SD card recovery for dummies like me?

I'm using a Mac, OS 10.12.6

Thank you!

[cgrenier]

Run PhotoRec, in Options, enable the Expert mode, start the recovery, choose a blocksize of 512 bytes, use the defaults options otherwise.
Does it work better ?

[civvie]

Thanks you! Where do I change the blocksize?

[recuperation]

When you are running photorec, at least in the version 7.0 that I have, you are asked for a block size after selection a directory for recovery.

[civvie]

OK - Thanks for the tips.

So, in expert mode, I've tried.

Partition: No partition [whole disk]
Filesystem: [Other] FAT/NTFS/...etc - I've also tried [ext2/ext3]
Try to unformat a FAT filesystem: No (If I choose Yes here then it just starts and I don't get an option to select Blocksize)
-Then it starts but if I hit enter on 'Stop' then I get the menu to select blocksize
Blocksize: 512 (not 512k - correct?)

Everything I've tried so far just produces a few files:
report.xml
f0044800.sqlite (64GB)
f0030976.plist
f00330246.plist

That's it.

Am I screwed?

[recuperation]

Hello civvie,

maybe your "accident" involved a "Format"-operation?
Please clone the SD card and try out the "Unformat option".

It's somehow strange that photorec did not find any jpeg-file.
Have you excluded some file formats?

[civvie]

Hello.
Yes I assume it was formatted when phone erased its self - possibly a 'secure format' which might mean I'm toast (I didn't do this by the way - a friend did - long story...)

I have an image .dmg of the entire SD that another recovery program made. So that's a backup.

I haven't excluded any filetypes, default settings - apart from Expert Mode.

I think I tried Unformat already - When I do that I can't select the Blocksize though - is that right?

[recuperation]

Hello cievvie,

Hello.
Yes I assume it was formatted when phone erased its self - possibly a 'secure format' which might mean I'm toast (I didn't do this by the way - a friend did - long story...)

I have an image .dmg of the entire SD that another recovery program made. So that's a backup.

I haven't excluded any filetypes, default settings - apart from Expert Mode.

I think I tried Unformat already - When I do that I can't select the Blocksize though - is that right?

I don't know, unfortunately!
I would recommend retrying using the dmg-image to see if that gives a different result.