Process of recovering my data from corrupted Sandisk SD card

Hi all, in this post I would be going through the steps/apps I used to gain back some of my data in my corrupted SD card without spending any money. 

Disclaimer: I didn't managed to recover all the data that was in it but managed to get back most of the important ones eg photos, songs. The photos here were taken after I already recovered the data so It might not be what you will see when you are using the software. 

Background: I bought this 64 GB SD card online, and used it as additional storage for my phone to store videos, songs, photos and documents. I had about 32 GB worth of data in it. I didn't go to a computer fixing place as Singapore is in circuit breaker mode(many non-essential places are closed) and I am a cheapskate (was afraid it was going to be expensive).

Identifying a corrupted SD card

So first, identifying that my SD card was corrupted. The moment it hit me was when after inserting the SD card into 3 devices( phone, tablet, computer),  they all had notifications with the suggestion that I need to format my card. On my phone and tablet, there was a notification suggesting that my SD card was damaged/corrupted. 

Looking back, some of the obvious signs of something being wrong with the SD was that firstly, every time i restarted the phone as far as 2 months back, there were always this notification popping up saying I need to fix the SD card. I obviously didn't look too much into it and basically ignored it. Secondly, I stored a lot of songs in the SD card (about 300) and did realized some time back that the amount of songs showing up in my music app was much lesser than usual but I didn't think much of it as I kinda just thought it was just syncing problem. Thirdly, (I didn't notice this until I took out the SD card) the name of the SD card in the notification is Samsung, not Sandisk. I did have some Samsung SD cards in other devices so I forgot what the brand of the SD card in my phone was until I took it out -.- The third sign was what convinced me that I had bought FAKE Sandisk SD card. It did last around 2 years though...

 Notification on my phone

               

 Not sure if SD card do peel off so easily

                                           

 Notifications on my computer

                                                       

Looking for solution

I googled for solutions and downloaded apps like MiniTool Power Data Recovery, MiniTool Partition Wizard, Disk Genius, and Recuva. 

None of these fully worked for me. What I wanted was to recover data without formatting. These apps supposedly could achieve what I wanted but many fell short.

I followed a YouTube guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2GZMevL4qk  to solve problems using chkdsk, basically using Windows to solve the problem within the corrupted SD. Nothing occurred as the programme stated something about my SD card being a RAW disc. So, I went to find solutions to fix that.

I found another YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cohUA4h3eW0 and followed its steps and downloaded all the software that was used. 

I remember spending 2 hours waiting for MiniTool Partition Wizard to go through the SD card. What ended up happening was that most of the data could not be seen eg when I pressed on the photos that were supposedly recovered, it can’t be open, with notification like file can’t be opened popping up. It did manage to recover some pdf files though.

 

I downloaded Disc Genius to fix the problem of corrupted SD card. The scanning took 2 hours. I don’t know if it actually worked as when I tried the chkdisc again, it still states that the SD card was a RAW disc. I then used Disk Genius to recover data and it took another 2 hours. It did work as in I could view the photos that were recovered. However, I could only download about 1 GB worth of data for the free version of the Disk Genius. Upgrading to the paid version needed about $50 which was way more than what I was willing to pay. 

 I pressed the verify or repair bad section.

                                                    

 I noticed the file recovery button and pressed it too.

                                                             

 

 

So off I went to search for free alternatives. I went to MiniTool Power Data Recovery and attempted to recover lost data and this time I could see the photos I recovered but the software would only recover 1GB of it and to recover more I needed to upgrade to the paid version. In the end, I decided to not upgrade and continued searching for free alternatives.

 

I then found https://www.softwarehow.com/free-data-recovery-tools/ and tried Recuva first. It could not even scan my SD card so I gave up on it. I then tried PhotoRec https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step. PhotoRec is really simple and I recovered about 4000 photos, hundreds of songs and some videos. I also recovered some documents. I actually had 50 episodes of some Chinese drama on the SD card but all of them wasn’t viewable :(  As for the documents, they were mostly recovered in the sxw form which I couldn’t really convert to any other readable/usable document type :( I did found a website https://convertio.co/  that successfully converted the sxw file to word docs but there was a limit to the amount of free conversion I could do so I ended up just giving up on recovering those documents which weren’t very important anyway.  

PhotoRec took about 2 hours to process and even though it didn’t recover my documents, I am still really happy with it as it recovered a lot of my photos and songs and it is FREE. Most songs were still playable although the titles of the songs were gone. I then spent the next few days sorting out my photos and songs. While sorting, I realized there were a lot of repeated photos which I think maybe due to 1) PhotoRec processing error 2) PhotoRec is so powerful that it managed to recover photos that I had previously deleted from the SD card.

Conclusion 

I believe the main reason I could recover most of my data is due to Disk Genius kind of repairing it (the SD card was still spoil as in cannot click on it to view files without the needing to format disc notice popping up) and then PhotoRec recovering data from the card. Hopefully these steps above helped someone else to recover their data! Thanks for reading.