GRcade

Hi,

I bought the latest gopro for filming a lot on our holiday (and only that ), and after a days use, it produced an error and corrupted the micro SD card, losing the entire first day and half of the next days footage, which I'm strawberry floating livid about. It was a good sd card too, and it proceeded to corrupt the other 3 I took at seemingly random points, meaning it say there was a 1 in 5 chance that it press record and it would strawberry float the card up. I shifted to backing up any footage straight after, and formatting the cards each time. Not ideal and pretty gooseberry fool.

I DID keep the first card unformatted though, so I'm wondering if there's a way to recover the data that's on there and get the start of the holiday back. It won't read at all on my android phone (I was using the phone and a usb adapter to transfer and back up after the first faliure).

Does anyone have experience of restoring or retrieving data from a corrupted Micro SD card? I have a PC and a usb adapter to read it on said pc if that's any help. I've tried asking ian Google, but just get the usual adverts masquerading as articles or forum questions where they assume you know most of the steps anyway. The only thing I DO know in this scenario is you want to clone the failed item and work on the clone in case you mess that up more, but I don't even know how to do that if it won't read it in the first place.

Any help would be most appreciated, thank you!

Victor Mildew wrote:Hi,

I bought the latest gopro for filming a lot on our holiday (and only that ), and after a days use, it produced an error and corrupted the micro SD card, losing the entire first day and half of the next days footage, which I'm strawberry floating livid about. It was a good sd card too, and it proceeded to corrupt the other 3 I took at seemingly random points, meaning it say there was a 1 in 5 chance that it press record and it would strawberry float the card up. I shifted to backing up any footage straight after, and formatting the cards each time. Not ideal and pretty gooseberry fool.

I DID keep the first card unformatted though, so I'm wondering if there's a way to recover the data that's on there and get the start of the holiday back. It won't read at all on my android phone (I was using the phone and a usb adapter to transfer and back up after the first faliure).

Does anyone have experience of restoring or retrieving data from a corrupted Micro SD card? I have a PC and a usb adapter to read it on said pc if that's any help. I've tried asking ian Google, but just get the usual adverts masquerading as articles or forum questions where they assume you know most of the steps anyway. The only thing I DO know in this scenario is you want to clone the failed item and work on the clone in case you mess that up more, but I don't even know how to do that if it won't read it in the first place.

Any help would be most appreciated, thank you!

Last time I had an issue I put it in my misses Apple Mac laptop, I have also used Linux sometimes other operating systems seem to have an easier job reading things windows cant... AOMEI do backup and partition software that's free maybe you could use that to make a clone first.

Victor Mildew wrote:Hi,

I bought the latest gopro for filming a lot on our holiday (and only that ), and after a days use, it produced an error and corrupted the micro SD card, losing the entire first day and half of the next days footage, which I'm strawberry floating livid about. It was a good sd card too, and it proceeded to corrupt the other 3 I took at seemingly random points, meaning it say there was a 1 in 5 chance that it press record and it would strawberry float the card up. I shifted to backing up any footage straight after, and formatting the cards each time. Not ideal and pretty gooseberry fool.

I DID keep the first card unformatted though, so I'm wondering if there's a way to recover the data that's on there and get the start of the holiday back. It won't read at all on my android phone (I was using the phone and a usb adapter to transfer and back up after the first faliure).

Does anyone have experience of restoring or retrieving data from a corrupted Micro SD card? I have a PC and a usb adapter to read it on said pc if that's any help. I've tried asking ian Google, but just get the usual adverts masquerading as articles or forum questions where they assume you know most of the steps anyway. The only thing I DO know in this scenario is you want to clone the failed item and work on the clone in case you mess that up more, but I don't even know how to do that if it won't read it in the first place.

Any help would be most appreciated, thank you!

Try photorec mate. Command line version. If anything is there, good chance it'll find it or reconstruct the partition table. Even partially overwritten files.

Also if it was sandisk, you might have SanDisk Recovery Pro, it actually works quite well. Can send you a license, I have at least 5.

Thank you both. I've not even tried it in the pc yet for fear of immidiately breaking it further, so I'm holding off until I've got the tools ready.

GG that sounds perfect, and a pro key would be much appreciated if you have one spare.

Green Gecko wrote:Try photorec mate. Command line version. If anything is there, good chance it'll find it or reconstruct the partition table. Even partially overwritten files.

Also if it was sandisk, you might have SanDisk Recovery Pro, it actually works quite well. Can send you a license, I have at least 5.

Update on this - i tried photorec, and it appeared to work, but the mp4 files it recovered were junk data. It turns out gopro video is stored in 3 parts, but as photorec is looking for a file type, it doesnt know what's what and just writes the files incorrectly with no way to save them that way.

BUT...

Included with photorec was another programme called testdisk, which is supposed to be for exploring and repairing disk partitions. What it does do is allow you to navigate what's on the sd card and extract anything it finds. And what was on there but all the video in its correct file formats. I got all the lost footage back

Over the moon, thanks for the help!

Victor Mildew wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Try photorec mate. Command line version. If anything is there, good chance it'll find it or reconstruct the partition table. Even partially overwritten files.

Also if it was sandisk, you might have SanDisk Recovery Pro, it actually works quite well. Can send you a license, I have at least 5.

Update on this - i tried photorec, and it appeared to work, but the mp4 files it recovered were junk data. It turns out gopro video is stored in 3 parts, but as photorec is looking for a file type, it doesnt know what's what and just writes the files incorrectly with no way to save them that way.

BUT...

Included with photorec was another programme called testdisk, which is supposed to be for exploring and repairing disk partitions. What it does do is allow you to navigate what's on the sd card and extract anything it finds. And what was on there but all the video in its correct file formats. I got all the lost footage back

Over the moon, thanks for the help!

This is the kind of victory story I can get on board with. Nevermind a bunch of cavers getting dragged out after two weeks of being in a damp cave or some twat rescued off a mountain, this one is genuinely heart warming. A chap has knocked his tripod whilst creating a bit of one-man homemade p0rn and corrupted his SD card - What a quandary! He can't send it away to have the data retrieved as there is a good chance of a custodial sentence down the line so he's turned to GRCade.
Huzzah! A combination of Green Gecko and pure good luck has averted calamity.

We are so lucky sometimes.

Victor Mildew wrote:

Green Gecko wrote:Try photorec mate. Command line version. If anything is there, good chance it'll find it or reconstruct the partition table. Even partially overwritten files.

Also if it was sandisk, you might have SanDisk Recovery Pro, it actually works quite well. Can send you a license, I have at least 5.

Update on this - i tried photorec, and it appeared to work, but the mp4 files it recovered were junk data. It turns out gopro video is stored in 3 parts, but as photorec is looking for a file type, it doesnt know what's what and just writes the files incorrectly with no way to save them that way.

BUT...

Included with photorec was another programme called testdisk, which is supposed to be for exploring and repairing disk partitions. What it does do is allow you to navigate what's on the sd card and extract anything it finds. And what was on there but all the video in its correct file formats. I got all the lost footage back

Over the moon, thanks for the help!

Yo, so glad you sorted it. I did find one of my Sandisk SD packages but it only came with a trial. The Sandisk extreme packaging is either long gone of buried somewhere.

Test disk is the underlying program for photorec, that will uncover any kind of data, even partial data, and even with a corrupted or non existent partition table (such as FAT). All photorec really does is attempt to recognise what type of file it is, as all data doesn't actually have a file type per say, it has a file header and the file extension is just part of the file name that the OS uses to recognise wtf that data is.

GoPro probably does that to overcome fat32 file size limitations and to ironically try to keep part of the recording if some minutes into it fails.

But the device probably corrupted the partition table, think the lines on a sheet of paper, rendering the file unreadable but still there because the operating system can't point to where it is.

Normally you can recover data if there's no hardware damage such as the data controller, memory modules or physical disk platters or read/write head on a hard disk.