Hey folks, my Sandisk Extreme SD card died during vacation. Windows 11 says “Please Insert Disk” when connected, and it shows as RAW/unallocated in Disk Management. Tried different readers & PCs - no luck. Desperate to recover photos from corrupted sd card - wedding pics inside! Any proven free/paid software? Or reliable recovery services? Don’t care ’bout cost, just need those memories back. Thanks a mil!
Before your photos are recovered, do not write any new data to the card. There are many paid data recovery software options available, but they may not always be able to deeply scan and find the photos you want. However, it is worth trying.
Hey, sounds like your SD card’s file system got corrupted, which is why Windows shows it as RAW or unallocated—it basically can’t read the partition info anymore.
First thing, don’t format the card right away! You can try running chkdsk on the card (just open Command Prompt and type chkdsk X: /f — replace X with your card’s drive letter). Sometimes that fixes file system errors and brings your data back. Also, check if you can assign a drive letter in Disk Management.
If that doesn’t work, you’ll want to use recovery software. Some good options are Recuva (free and simple), PhotoRec (also free and great with RAW), or paid tools like Stellar Photo Recovery
or Disk Drill which are very user-friendly and reliable.
Once you get your photos back, you can format the card properly—either right in Windows or using the official SD Formatter tool—to make it usable again.
Need help walking through any of these steps? Just ask!
