Page 1 of 1

[ADVICE] Trying to recover photos from corrupted 64GB SD card

Posted: 26 Oct 2020, 05:29
by alechko
Hello good people of cgsecurity.

I have a 64GB SD card from android phone that contains multiple images/videos that I want to recover.
The SD card was probably unmounted wrong or something similar, so right now it's getting stuck every time I try to read the information from it.
I believe that the fs on the card was FAT32.

I've started a photorec job and it has identified the SD card as 'No partition', so my card reader shows minimal activity and there's no progress on the photorec job.

My question is, should I abort this job and run a partition recovery with the testdisk utility or should I keep the photorec job run until the end?

Thank you!

Re: [ADVICE] Trying to recover photos from corrupted 64GB SD card

Posted: 26 Oct 2020, 09:09
by recuperation
Please run Testdisk and post the Testdisk log file.

Re: [ADVICE] Trying to recover photos from corrupted 64GB SD card

Posted: 28 Oct 2020, 07:03
by alechko
I'm currently running the photorec job and it seems that it's finding some files very slowly, I think that I will try to let it finish and I will try running testdisk after that.

Disk /dev/disk2 - 63 GB / 59 GiB (RO)
Partition Start End Size in sectors
No partition 0 0 1 124735487 0 1 124735488 [Whole disk]

Pass 1 - Reading sector 6242766/124735488, 258 files found
Elapsed time 50h09m19s - Estimated time to completion 951h59m15

I will certainly come back to this thread once its done!

Re: [ADVICE] Trying to recover photos from corrupted 64GB SD card

Posted: 03 Nov 2020, 08:06
by alechko
So my recovery process was interrupted before it finished, and I'm trying to run testdisk ever since, the process hangs and causing multiple other processes to hang, one time even got my mac rebooted.

I'm getting an error on the analyze part: "Warning: Bad starting sector (CHS and LBA don't match)"

I have to remove the SD card before it completes to keep my mac running...

Re: [ADVICE] Trying to recover photos from corrupted 64GB SD card

Posted: 04 Nov 2020, 00:08
by recuperation
The hanging processes suggest to me that you might have hardware problems with the SD card. Try duplicating it using ddrescue as described in the manual.
You would then have a physically healthy duplicate drive and your system should not hang anymore.
Then rerun Photorec.