Data recovery.....

Seems the wife's microSD card in her DroidX decided to commit suicide today.... Is there any means of getting the info off, or do they "blank" themselves? Just seems odd that is just ups and quits working...

Anyone?

flash memory works by holding an electrical charge. if anything disrupts that charge even for a microsecond, its likely to cause full data loss.

that being said, i've noticed cell phones aren't the best when it comes to mounting memory cards, have you tried rebooting the phone/remounting the carD?

That is a little weird those little cards seem pretty robust. have you tried putting it in a card reader and seeing if your PC can pull any data off of it?

Yes and yes. Phone doesn't recognize the card and neither does the computer with the lil interface for usb.

If the data is just "gone" but the card shows up there are ways. If it cant even be recognized I think its bad news.

try this. its free and i've used the company's partitioning program with success... http://www.pcinspector.de/smartrecovery/info.htm?language=1

If the card can't be recognized, chances of recovery are basically zero unless you pay big $$$$ for a data recovery company to try to expose the chip inside and pull the data off. Even if the card is recognizable, data on flash cards is rarely recoverable.

I recommend treating flash storage like RAID0 arrays - assume it's unrecoverable if anything goes wrong, and back it up often.

I accidentally deleted about 400 images off my phone's SD card yesterday.

I was trying to move data from a shared folder on my computer. What I didnt realize, was that what it really did was actually move the data to my phone, but change the directory of said shared folder on the computer to the location my phone. So I saw the items in 2 places. I figured, well, its on the phone now, I can delete the contents of the folder on my computer.

I should have paid close attention when it asked "Are you sure you want to permanently delete the contents of this folder?"

It took me about 5 minutes to figure out what really happened. FML.

failboat wrote: I accidentally deleted about 400 images off my phone's SD card yesterday. I was trying to move data from a shared folder on my computer. What I didnt realize, was that what it really did was actually move the data to my phone, but change the directory of said shared folder on the computer to the location my phone. So I saw the items in 2 places. I figured, well, its on the phone now, I can delete the contents of the folder on my computer. I should have paid close attention when it asked "Are you sure you want to permanently delete the contents of this folder?" It took me about 5 minutes to figure out what really happened. FML.

THAT is easily recoverable, just don't write to that card!

Use this app:

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

dont write to that card.....as in, dont move additional files to it, or take more photos with my phone? oops I did that a little bit.

Thanks though, I'll try this when I get home tonight. The files were not REALLY important, a lot of right-click save-as stuff from the internets, and images that I used to frequently paste pictures of co-workers on to humiliate them. Come to think of it, that is pretty important. I hope I can salvage at least some of what I accidentally deleted.

Gameboy is right. My step daughter had a SD card that failed in her camera after a trip to France with hundreds of pictures on it. I got a data recovery program off the internet and restored her pictures along with about fifty pictures that she had deleted off the card when she was in college. I was amazed that the program was albe to salvage everything including the deleted images and it was quick and easy. It has been a few years so I don't remember what program I used.

failboat wrote: dont write to that card.....as in, dont move additional files to it, or take more photos with my phone? oops I did that a little bit.

Yeah don't do any of that. The more you write the less data will be recoverable.

Apart from the usual "undelete" utilities like Recuva, a lower-level recovery app I recommend is Photorec. If those two don't get it back, there's probably nothing you can do without peeling chips apart/opening the hard drive in a clean room.

I just used Recuva and it brought back all my image files I accidentally from my SD card. Awesome!

Just be careful about the kinds of pics you might restore...