This is from the XDA forums, and I’m really mad because I had pictures on an SD card that I just could not recover for over a year before I found this post… and now I can’t find it.
Anyway, I hope this helps somebody out there. From sonarchist on the XDA forums: Damaged microSD Card…(this is how I recovered my Data)
…….right in the middle of a super demanding day, the message “damaged SD Card / Reformat” appeared on my Epic, when I least expected it (inopportune is the word)………… changing firmware is never without its more interesting moments, + this may or may not be a symptom (went froyo to gingerbread), however,……….. am sharing this post to the Epic community, as i sense this to be an important enough issue………..no one really knows the specific cause of sd card corruption + failure: it’s variable + always somewhat circumstantial (ie, saw it mentioned elsewhere that overheating from an overclocked cpu could cause damage as well)……………….so, moving forward I simply want to contribute as a brief description, here, how i was able to recover (most) of the files from my ‘damaged micro sd card:’
First, when i saw ‘damaged sd card / format card’ on the phone, when it became possible 4 me to do so many hours later, instead of ‘formatting’ I replaced the damaged card for a new one (pny 16gb sdhc class 10)…booted the phone everything was fine (15.91gb space available)……..as expected, no files in the SD Card………………….next:
(1) placed ‘damaged’ sd card into the reader that came w/ the device, and mounted to pc, selected the drive (followed by confirmation beep ‘device detected’ sound, then the language: ‘d:\ not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable’ came on the screen……….went to RUN and typed CMD……..from new window, I typed Chkdsk d: /r and the PC began reading the contents of the damaged SD card (most of the android zip files etcetera were there, as were a number of files w/ no content) + next i typed ‘exit’ (no quotations, just the letters) to return to the windows desktop…….OK, so now the only files missing are the pix + video mov’s (far as I can remember).
……….(2) next, to recover pix + video, from the pc desktop i opened ZARecovery (if you do not already have it go to Data Recovery Software, Solutions, Tutorials, Forum – ZAR Data Recovery and download the free recovery program from that site).
………….(3) from the ZARrecovery main page, selected sd card as device, selected ‘next’, selected ‘root’ folder for all files that ZAR was able to detect as recoverable, entered destination folder name (for transfer of recovered pix + video to PC….note: NEVER to sd card itself!), + lastly, selected ‘start copying selected files’………and that was it, closed ZAR + began viewing the content of the recovery folder to get an assessment of what had actually been recovered, and what had been lost……………..fortunately 4 me, the loss was minimal, as I tend to create backups (Nandroids, every half year; pic, videos, email attachments = pretty regularly).
Hope this helps those of you that have been experiencing microSD Card damage (from whatever source).
Remember, + not to speak to the Choir, but can not to overstate this: BACKUP…………. BACKUP…………. BACKUP………….BACKUP
Thoughts and Thoughts 