Problem with SD card

wadewade

My daughter was trying to download her photos from an SD card to my laptop using our little SD card USB gadget. A thing she has done many times. This time I suspect she clicked on something wrongly as it was loading and now has a message "Memory Card Error - Format yes/no"

Not sure what she did but has she lost her photos or can we get them back?

bluesnake

Formatting may erase it.

Personally i would put the card back into its original equipment slot and see if it fixes the format problem without formatting it.

Apparently this works well, just do not save an more stuff back to the card

http://www.cardrecovery.com/os.asp


The one I use in drives is Recuva as it works as well as most of the paid for software and sometimes better

wadewade

I'm back from holiday now and have downloaded the evaluation copy of CardRecovery. It found the pictures we couldn't access but then said I needed to pay $40 in order to get a key to unlock the program in order to save them.

This seems quite a lot for one use as I doubt whether I shall need to use the program again.

Are there any free software programs that will do the same job for me, please?

closed

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm

http://www.pcinspector.de/SmartRecovery/info.htm?language=1

wadewade

Thank you both. I've tried all four suggestions and I'll list my experiences in case they are any help to someone else:-

CardRecover: Seemed to recover all the pictures but required me to buy full program in order to save results for $40.

Pinform - Recuva: Said "Unable to read boot sector". failed

Easeus: Seemed to recover all the pictures but required me to buy the full program for $70 as my file was more than 1GB.

PC Inspector - Smart Recovery 4.5 by Convar:
THIS ONE WORKED and saved the results free of charge. Only drawback was that it said it's usual quick program would not work because of damage so it went on to Deep Recovery which did work. But it took 5 hours to recover 280 pictures.

But no complaints - it worked and saved free of charge.

Thanks again. My daughter will be very happy when I show her the results.

debitcardmayhem

I too was on holiday, whilst your post arrived , for future use/information I would also try using Testdisk/Photorec also free ...http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk