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I have a MacBookPro that allows me to insert an SD card. The card was formatted in my Sony 6000 camera and I assume it is exFAT since I could read it on my Win 7 and OS X 10.10 machines as well as Ubuntu 20.
I mistakenly erased some images on the card (yes, I know I should have backed them up) and so downloaded and started TestDisk. Testdisk recognised the drive and I started Testdisk in normal user mode. Instruction bade me to use superuser mode and I did so on my second attempt. I selected my disk (why did it appear twice - once as dev/diskx and once as dev/rdiskx- a subsidiary question) and tried to recover files.

Testdisk told me that "No partition from this disk must be mounted". So I closed the terminal session and ejected the drive from the MacOS gui and tried Testdisk again. Alas testdisk could not find the SD card.
Whatever I did seemed to kill the SD card as my Sony camera would not recognise the SD card neither would my Mac. I connected the device via a usb card reader and ran gparted on my Ubuntu 20 system (without changing anything). Now gparted claims that the device has an unallocated size of about 16 MB and about 59.62 GB of an unknown file system. I suspect that after ejecting the SD card something happened. Perhaps some process had not completed before I removed the card.

Running Testdisk does not help - as it does not see the drive.

Are there any suggestions as to how I might be able to recover my data ?
Thanks

vladimir wrote: 11 Oct 2021, 20:43 I have a MacBookPro that allows me to insert an SD card. The card was formatted in my Sony 6000 camera and I assume it is exFAT since I could read it on my Win 7 and OS X 10.10 machines as well as Ubuntu 20.
I mistakenly erased some images on the card (yes, I know I should have backed them up) and so downloaded and started TestDisk. Testdisk recognised the drive and I started Testdisk in normal user mode. Instruction bade me to use superuser mode and I did so on my second attempt. I selected my disk (why did it appear twice - once as dev/diskx and once as dev/rdiskx- a subsidiary question) and tried to recover files.

Testdisk told me that "No partition from this disk must be mounted". So I closed the terminal session and ejected the drive from the MacOS gui and tried Testdisk again. Alas testdisk could not find the SD card.
Whatever I did seemed to kill the SD card as my Sony camera would not recognise the SD card neither would my Mac. I connected the device via a usb card reader and ran gparted on my Ubuntu 20 system (without changing anything). Now gparted claims that the device has an unallocated size of about 16 MB and about 59.62 GB of an unknown file system.

Run Testdisk/Photorec under linux as Gparted sees the SD card.

I suspect that after ejecting the SD card something happened. Perhaps some process had not completed before I removed the card.

Running Testdisk does not help - as it does not see the drive.

Keep in mind that when talking about recognition or seeing of storage devices both terms refer to being aware of an additional device. In Windows operating systems the device manager decides if you can continue with recovery on your own or if have to consult a professional recovery service because of hardware issues - like a plugged in but invisible drive.

NETT
Nett : Testing a brand new 16 GB SD card which is formatted by the camera to FAT32 storing camera generated photos deleting them and trying to get testdisk to recover the files did not recover any files. (assuming I was following the procedure properly) Trying to recover data from a 64 GB SD card (the actual problem) whose filesystem got corrupted only showed a 16 MB partition in testdisk in both OS X and Ubuntu 20 and I could not find a way for testdisk to help recreate the filesystem. Clearly I am doing something wrong. Any advice would be appreciated.



Details

I tried a test. I bought a 16 GB sdcard, wrote some images on it using my Sony 6000 camera erased the images and tried to recover them. That was not successful. Although this time, testdisk recognised the partitions and format, it was unable to recover the deleted images either on Ubuntu or OS X 10.10.
Here's what it looked like on my Mac OS X 10.10 when I tried to recover the erased files from the 16 GB SD card.

Disk /dev/rdisk1 - 15 GB / 14 GiB - 31116288 sectors (RO)
Current partition structure:
Partition Start End Size in sectors

Warning: number of heads/cylinder mismatches 255 (FAT) != 1 (HD)
---> Is this saying the number of heads/cylinder should be 1 ? Why is it readonly ?

Warning: number of sectors per track mismatches 63 (FAT) != 1 (HD)
1 * FAT32 LBA 8192 31117311 31109120 [NO NAME]

Warning: Bad ending sector (CHS and LBA don't match)

What do these error messages mean and how can I get testdisk to recover my data (probably by first restoring the partition)

Running under Ubuntu did not provide any additional information alas


Going back to the reason I was using testdisk I was trying to recover erased data from a 64 GB drive which under Linux shows only an unallocated 16 MB partition under testdisk while showing the unallocated partition and undefined file system for the 59.62 GB. Is there any way of recovering this data ?

I can't draw any conclusion from your error description.

If you want to try to recover deleted files, try TestDisk, Advanced, Undelete and if it doesn't work, use PhotoRec instead.