Photorec can’t recover Nikon .NEF files from corrupted SD Card. Help needed

[Photobuff]

Hi all! I’m writing looking for some advise since I’m kind of desperate now. I just came back from a trip abroad where I had a problem with my 32GB Kingston sd card. I was shooting normally until the camera showed a Card Err. It had around 200/300 pictures. I changed the card and was confident I could recover the files easily when I got back home.

When I put it in the laptop, windows recognized the card but showed it as an unformatted drive.

Moving forward: I tried with some tools such as recuva, zar, etc etc but none of them found a single file. Then I remembered Testdisk, which I had used once with a hdd, and found about Photorec and read the good comments from people.

I set up Photorec to look only for Nikon .NEF files (TIF), leaving the rest of the stuff default, and launched the scan. First off, it’s really slow, it’s been scanning for some days. It shows around 62million total sectors and after a long time the scanning has reached the 30 million sector with zero files found.

Should I give up? I mean there were like 200/300 files around 20/30MB each and hasn’t found any yet...

What do you think I could do? Maybe setting up some config option in Photorec?

I can’t understand how any tool finds anything, I mean there are a bunch of files that must be there

I had thought about using windows quick format to enable the card again and trying to recover the files as deleted files but it is maybe a bad idea, what do you think?

I also tried using a Linux laptop but it didn’t even recognize the card, not even listing the /dev through command line.

As you see I’m so frustrated now, I can’t imagine losing those one-in-a-lifetime pics.

I do appreciate any help.

[cgrenier]

I think the memory card controller is damaged. You should contact a data recovery company.

[Photobuff]

Thank you for answering, I'll do that.

I wonder why this has happen, the card is almost new and is an average one: Kingston SDA10 32GB.