does anyone know how to undelete or repair an sd card? It's happened a few times and I usually format and start over. Any help would be appreciated.
Chris
Chris
Question How to repair corrupted sd card?
- Thread starter noellenchris
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SyCoREAPER
Retired Forum Moderator
Word of advice, unless it's an expensive high capacity card, it's landfill waste. Chances of a card that badly corrupted being fixed are slim and being reliable even less so.
As others have already mentioned : formatting is a big no-no with NAND flash drives -except when you need to switch to another filesystem (in this case go for the "quick format" option to lessen the damage done).
But a lesser-known fact is that using any journalling filesytem (among these are ext4 and NTFS) on flash memory is also a quick killer for it, due to the constant logging going on even when idle. You should always -when possible of course- use a flash-friendly FS like F2FS or exFAT instead.
Sometimes of course, there's just no say in that matter for the users. Just know that it impacts the memory's life-span
Depends on how it was corrupted. If it happened spontaneously it's likely trash.
If it was due to user mismanagement, it can be reused.
However I agree if there's any doubt of its integrity it should be replaced because critical data can not...
A new card should come straight online and formatt on the phone with zero issues. If it doesn't it should be returned. Otherwise it will likely continue to have issues.
Droidriven
Recognized Contributor
I used a sdcard years ago converted to RAW in order to modify/flash/root a Nook tablet. I was never able to repair the card to normall usage. I used every trick I could find and nothing worked.
Low level format will bring it back unless it's damaged. I've never worn out a flash drive, obsolescence is what kills them. ESD exposure can damaged them as well. Exposures are cumulative and can eventually cause a failure.
It large enough one time exposure can kill them.
They have limited ESD input protection.
A card that behaves improperly at the get go it likely has hardware damage; even if you get it working it will continue to cause problems unpredictably.
Droidriven
Recognized Contributor
I also have a Samsung 32GB that worked flawlessly for years in several devices until one day I got a new device, ejected the card and inserted it into the new device, it was detected then immediately lost detection,when troubleshooting and putting it back into the previous device, completely dead, never got it to show any signs of life again, no detection, unable to format, no recovery software could do anything, just....nothing.
Best to always first format the card in the new device then populate the card through the phone.
It may have been from ESD damage. Touching an earth ground immediately before handling will bleed off any charge. Wear cotton. Room humidity should be at least 40%. If you can feel, hear or see static electricity it's already enough to cause damage.
Sim cards are even more susceptible to ESD damage; handle them like a stick of ram. They're dirt cheap but a failure will cost you time and trouble maybe at a critical moment. Almost all sim card failures are the result of ESD exposure.
There is nothing that can be done. There is always a confirmatory command to be given for the an sd card to be formatted. When this command is given by you, there is nothing that can be done
buying a new sd card with the same exact model will magically summon a new working sd card that doesnt have a problem
Cheap, unknown, pirate cards tend to be faulty. Try inserting the card in the phone, format it. Turno off and on the phone. Does the phone propmpt you to format it again?
After formatting again, shutdown phone, remove card, add it into a computer. If it recognises the card, copy files/ folders on it. Several gb:s. I had a 128 gb card and I wrote about 20gb on my. Unplug from computer, reinsert. Are the files still there? Can you access them?
Insert card into phone again. Will you see the files on the card at all? Do you have to format it?
If the steps where I asked a question fails, card probably card faulty. Usually it is enough when the first steps fail to indicate a faulty card.
There is software to check card through reading/ writing data to the card. I takes time when it does this. It took 3-5 days when it tried writing on my faulty cards.
It detected faulty parts on the cards after 7gb on the card with storage capacity from 128gb card.
Hope this helps.
After formatting again, shutdown phone, remove card, add it into a computer. If it recognises the card, copy files/ folders on it. Several gb:s. I had a 128 gb card and I wrote about 20gb on my. Unplug from computer, reinsert. Are the files still there? Can you access them?
Insert card into phone again. Will you see the files on the card at all? Do you have to format it?
If the steps where I asked a question fails, card probably card faulty. Usually it is enough when the first steps fail to indicate a faulty card.
There is software to check card through reading/ writing data to the card. I takes time when it does this. It took 3-5 days when it tried writing on my faulty cards.
It detected faulty parts on the cards after 7gb on the card with storage capacity from 128gb card.
Hope this helps.
There are a few utilities which can (my favourite is File Scavenger on Windows), but it's a coin toss at best, as NAND storage doesn't retain erased data like a magnetic hard drive does : in the latter case the data is still there but the entry pointing to the blocks of data have been taken out from the index table (the FAT on exFAT, and inode superblock on Linux/Unix filesystems. NTFS has a more elaborate indexing system than FAT-derived filesystems, with redundant copies which make it easier to recover files. Sadly, journalling filesystems like NTFS and ext are killing flash memory cells at a far faster rate...), so at worst you just need to scan the whole surface to look for the patterns indicating the start of a data block.
But on flash storage, once a block is marked as "deleted", the flash controller pretty quickly issues TRIM commands, which once launched overwrites the whole block with ones (flash works the opposite as harddrives : to write on magnetic media you set a bit from 0 to 1, but on flash you set it from 1 to 0) so it can be allocated again ASAP upon the next write command...
Which basically means that if you don't realize your mistake and power off the SD card right away, and only power it back on once it's protected behind a write-blocking adapter, your data will be gone forever in mere minutes, if that... :/
Okay this works
Update the driver of the sd card from the manufacturer (if available) you can use a memory flasher tool to only update the firmware and not erase the data or format it.
If the drivet is not available, try an sd repair kit by SanDisk or any other prominent strorage device manufacturer.
Although flash memory(Nand, is a bit tricky so it's50/50)
But if it's a prominent brand like San disk. Try using their repair tool kit.
First thing: If it's an Android device that's telling you it needs repair the SD card, you should pop out the sd card carrier (which also usually doubles as the SIM carrier if the device can use the phone network), reseat the sd card (and SIM if it's there), and push it back in, then see if Android still tells you it's corrupted. If it does, then you can proceed to the rest of the suggestions. If it doesn't, you saved yourself a lot of stress.
I've had to do this on Samsung Galaxy-line phones and tablets, as well as some cheap tablets. (I usually use SanDisk SD cards.) I don't know what causes it, but sometimes it just fails to communicate while reading the MBR or boot sectors and doesn't retry the way the filesystem code usually does.
I've seen this. A reboot solves it for me. It will happen if you eject the card (you should do this before physically removing the card) then reinsert without a reboot (2 reboots maybe needed). Think that's when I've seen this behavior. It's seated right and the card is fine, just a system trait but it really gets your attention
Of course if you have removed the card and the above fails check the placement. It's best to leave the card in and not move it around. Avoid touching the contacts and remember even small static discharges can destroy them or cause a latter failure. Cleaning the contacts with anhydrous isopropyl can also be tried if needed.
The SanDisk Extreme cards are excellent; in over 5 years of heavy use, zero issues.
When commissioning a new card always format the card in the Android first before any data is loaded.
Never share that card with other devices like a cam without reformatting before use first with the new device and vice-versa. It's ok to read a foreign card but writing to it may corrupt it!
Sharing a card between two cams may cause the same behavior and rip the file structure to shreds
Depends on how it was corrupted. Sometimes a low level format will save it if the damage isn't from a physical failure.
New cards that won't easily format should be returned as they are defective. In time they will likely fail even if you do manage to "salvage" it.
Not quite. Sure, journaling adds some writing overhead, but it's only around 10% for ext4. Not sure about NTFS, but probably similar.
ext4 was mainly designed with hard drives in mind, for example it writes files strategically to reduce fragmentation. (source) But it turns out it performs on flash memory quite well, even if not as good as F2FS.
ext4 was the default Android internal storage file system since the Gingerbread (2.3) days, replacing YAFFS (another file system made specifically for flash storage), and is only in recent years being phased out in favour of F2FS. It is stable and reliable and has been the default file system in the Linux world for many years.
[This post is in the public domain, CC0 1.0.]
If Android reports a USB stick or SD card as "corrupted", it might contain an unsupported file system. It also seems Android refuses flash media with more than one partition. So before concluding that it is corrupted, try accessing it from a Linux or Windows computer.
Windows, the most popular desktop operating system, offers exFAT and NTFS besides FAT32 for formatting external media. This means exFAT and NTFS are the only options with no 4 GiB limit.
(For the sake of completeness, FAT16 also exists, but only for very small media in the single-digit gigabytes, and FAT12 in the megabyte range. Both are simply referred to as "FAT" in the formatting widget.)
exFAT was not supported by stock Android until 2020! Some vendors might have supported it earlier, for example Samsung supported exFAT at least since the Galaxy S4, early 2013.
This means stock Android users were stick with FAT32 on external storage, which, as you may remember, comes with the infamous 4 GiB file size limitation. So if you wanted to watch long HD videos on the go, this was going to be a nuisance, because those files could easily exceed 4 GiB, unless your smartphone vendor chose to add exFAT.
Before exFAT was natively supported on Android, it formatted any media as FAT32, regardless of size. Given that SD/MicroSD cards in excess of 32 GB are usually shipped with exFAT out of the factory, Android might have reported a brand new MicroSD card as "corrupted" for having an unsupported file system. Since exFAT is supported, Android formats anything in excess of 32 GB as exFAT, and anything up to 32 GB as FAT32, according to my manual testing.
The Windows formatting widget does not even allow formatting anything beyond 32 GB as FAT32, even if it is technically possible. This is because of a decision by Microsoft software engineer Dave Plummer, which he came to regret. (source) But it can still be done manually from the Windows command line and from Linux.
exFAT was proprietary until August 2019, when Microsoft graciously open-sourced it. So since 2019, everyone can thankfully freely use exFAT, even commercially.
NTFS (default on Windows) is read-only on Samsung smartphones released in recent years,not sure about stock Android and other vendors . Edit: It seems stock Android has a NTFS driver now (code search), but I haven't found out yet if it does writing too.
ext4 is natively supported by the Android kernel, but for some reason Android does not recognize external storage formatted with it. This may be some kind of deliberate restriction by Google. A possible reason is that an ext4 flash drive would let an external computer change the permissions (file ownership, read/write/execute bits), so it might interfere with Android's permission model.
NTFS existed for longer than exFAT. In the early 2000s, NTFS was the only way to handle files in excess of 4 GiB on Windows. For anything cross-platform, you had to fumble around with FAT32.
FAT32 has been the common denominator across operating systems and embedded systems (standalone multimedia devices with USB ports such as CD boomboxes, DVD home players, HiFi, car radios) for decades, because 4 GiB are well beyond the size of music files (single to double-digit megabytes), but can cause trouble for somewhat long HD and 4K videos and for other types of data such as disk images and archive files (ZIP, 7z, TAR, RAR and so on).
[This post is in the public domain, CC0 1.0.]
Windows, the most popular desktop operating system, offers exFAT and NTFS besides FAT32 for formatting external media. This means exFAT and NTFS are the only options with no 4 GiB limit.
(For the sake of completeness, FAT16 also exists, but only for very small media in the single-digit gigabytes, and FAT12 in the megabyte range. Both are simply referred to as "FAT" in the formatting widget.)
exFAT was not supported by stock Android until 2020! Some vendors might have supported it earlier, for example Samsung supported exFAT at least since the Galaxy S4, early 2013.
This means stock Android users were stick with FAT32 on external storage, which, as you may remember, comes with the infamous 4 GiB file size limitation. So if you wanted to watch long HD videos on the go, this was going to be a nuisance, because those files could easily exceed 4 GiB, unless your smartphone vendor chose to add exFAT.
Before exFAT was natively supported on Android, it formatted any media as FAT32, regardless of size. Given that SD/MicroSD cards in excess of 32 GB are usually shipped with exFAT out of the factory, Android might have reported a brand new MicroSD card as "corrupted" for having an unsupported file system. Since exFAT is supported, Android formats anything in excess of 32 GB as exFAT, and anything up to 32 GB as FAT32, according to my manual testing.
The Windows formatting widget does not even allow formatting anything beyond 32 GB as FAT32, even if it is technically possible. This is because of a decision by Microsoft software engineer Dave Plummer, which he came to regret. (source) But it can still be done manually from the Windows command line and from Linux.
exFAT was proprietary until August 2019, when Microsoft graciously open-sourced it. So since 2019, everyone can thankfully freely use exFAT, even commercially.
NTFS (default on Windows) is read-only on Samsung smartphones released in recent years,
ext4 is natively supported by the Android kernel, but for some reason Android does not recognize external storage formatted with it. This may be some kind of deliberate restriction by Google. A possible reason is that an ext4 flash drive would let an external computer change the permissions (file ownership, read/write/execute bits), so it might interfere with Android's permission model.
NTFS existed for longer than exFAT. In the early 2000s, NTFS was the only way to handle files in excess of 4 GiB on Windows. For anything cross-platform, you had to fumble around with FAT32.
FAT32 has been the common denominator across operating systems and embedded systems (standalone multimedia devices with USB ports such as CD boomboxes, DVD home players, HiFi, car radios) for decades, because 4 GiB are well beyond the size of music files (single to double-digit megabytes), but can cause trouble for somewhat long HD and 4K videos and for other types of data such as disk images and archive files (ZIP, 7z, TAR, RAR and so on).
[This post is in the public domain, CC0 1.0.]
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87Sometimes the filesystem on the card gets corrupted. It can happen for example if the card was ejected while a file operation on it was in progress. When that happens you might have trouble accessing some of the files, loading times for some directories in file explorer may be very slow.
You can attempt to fix it using the desktop windows' built-in chkdsk utility.
Open up command prompt (start->run->cmd.exe) and type
chkdsk /X /F <SD card drive letter>
My SD card reader is X:\ drive, so i wold use the following command:
chkdsk /X /F X:
SD card reader is recommended, but probably not necessary because it should also work with WinMo's built-in USB mass storage function or wm5torage.
Under linux you can check/fix the card's filesysterm and in some cases undelete a file using fsck.vfat or dosfsck (single tool, two possible names). Refer to its help for more details.9Instructions
things you'll need:
* SD Card
* Computer
* Internet Connection
*1
If your aim is to repair a corrupted SD card so that you can use it to store files then proceed to step #2.
If your aim is to recover the files on the SD card without erasing them, proceed to step #5.
*2
Insert the SD card into a digital camera card slot and choose to format your card. If this doesn't work then move on to the next step...
*3
Place the SD card into your computers SD card slot.
Right click on the SD card drive letter IF it appears and choose to "format."
If this doesn't work, proceed to the next step...
*4
www.sdcard.org
You will need to go to the website
http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter/eula/
Here you will download, install, and run the program to format your SD card. This is the most advanced step of the three, but most likely to work 99% of the time.
*5
www.cgsecurity.org
If you want to recover files ON your SD without erasing them, then you need to download and run the software on this site.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
This is the best free software available for this type of problem.
6don t format in the name of GOD!!!
Please all keep in mind>>>> drive recovery pro is a nice solution,but formatting a hard drive is ok,and important.NOT A SD CARD!!!The continous files are different from the usual hard drive files!!
NO NEED FORMATTING!!!
In fact>>formatting an SD card lower the life time of the card with a good year or more!!Anyhow they made to survive only around two years!!!
The continous upload and erase sssions are killing the SD card.BUT FORMATTING IS TH BIGGEST KILLER.Check the experts,what they say???
Corrupted cards can be deffected from factory as wel,but drive check and restore is the best.The sectors are damaged,and not the fragmantation....
helios55
