Recovering Data from an Unformattable Micro SD Card

I have recently happened upon a problem I am having with my SanDisk 8GB Micro SD Card. When I tried to insert it into my phone (a Moto E 2nd gen), it was constantly unmounting itself. Inserting it into my laptop reveals that the storage capacity is a whopping 0kb, and I am unable to format it. I have read this article ( https://ardamis.com/2009/07/02/usb-drive-unusable-unformattable-and-reporting-0-bytes-capacity/ ) and know that it can be fixed; however my SD Card has some important documents on it, and the guide says that this process will format the card. My question is: If I follow the guide, will my data be unrecoverable. I know there are tools that can restore deleted files, but will they become useless after following the guide? Is there another way to format the Card while leaving the data on it intact?

No, formatting means wiping the drive. His method will delete all contents on the drive.

If this is an older drive that you have used for a long, long while, there is a good chance that the card has reached the end of its service life. You could try a data recovery program such as Recuva, but it seems unlikely you will have success.

If it were me, I would probably do something like this if the data was critically important 

(obviously, this quickly becomes a major time expenditure, and it can get very expensive very quickly)

  1. try using a backup software to reproduce an image or clone of the drive (the file destination of the clone would be to the local disk on the computer). The backup software I use is called Bvckup2, and it has a free trial period. I think it is much, much better than every other backup software for Windows I have used. After performing the image backup, check the destination file on the local computer’s hard drive to see if it copied anything.

  2. check the SD card for errors (open My Pc, right mouse click on the drive, select properties, select check for errors’ - if found, try to fix

  3. access the DiskPart menu, and then check two things: 1) ‘list disk’ - does the SD card show up??? — 2) ‘list vol’ – does the SD card show up? if so, is the status ‘healthy’ or something else?

  4. use BadBlocks to check for bad sectors - depending on the results, the drive may be 100% unrecoverable

4a) if the files on this drive are very expensive or of critical importance, then send the drive to a data recovery firm with the understanding that this gets very expensive very quickly, and with limited success…this will quickly become more expensive than purchasing ten top-of-the-line 64gb MLC-based microSD cards

  1. attempt doing what your webpage says, with the understanding that this will make the data 100% unrecoverable if it is not already

  2. throw out the SD card and purchase two SD cards that use premium MLC NAND flash - this leaves you with the option of periodically making a clone of the drive in the phone so that you have multiple copies of the same files

ymmv

Here’s how you recover data from a micro SD card - recover data from micro SD card