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!
It’s annoying when your SD card corrupts and your priceless pictures suddenly become unusable. Errors such as “SD card inaccessible,” “Windows cannot read the disk,” or the disappearance of your photos are possible. Users typically worry about losing valuable work files or priceless memories as a result of such problems. Inadequate ejection, virus infection, incorrect sectors, unexpected power outages during file transfers, and physical damage are some of the causes of SD card corruption. Windows may ask you to format the SD card before using it, indicating file system damage.
Use a trustworthy SD Card Data Recovery Tool to safely retrieve your deleted images. This program restores lost, formatted, or erased photos without compromising their original quality by thoroughly scanning corrupted or unreadable cards. It functions flawlessly on Windows 11 and supports all SD card brands. Simply plug in your SD card, scan it, view any recoverable images, and safely save them to your computer.
If the card shows up as Raw/unallocated, that usually means the file system got nuked but the actual data blocks might still be there. Since you already got the files back (glad that worked), just make sure you don’t reuse that SD card for anything important.
If it ever happens again, avoid doing writes or formats right away. A lot of photo folks keep a small repair tool around for cases like this. Some apps can fix photos that come out corrupted or half-loaded after recovery, so keep that in mind if anything looks broken in the future.
