So my phone suddenly asked me to insert a SD card. Odd, it already has one in it. Look through my picture folder and everything is gone!
Pulled out card and put back in, no good. Put card into PC, nothing. Its like its not even there to say its bad.
Ideas? I'm not tech savvy at all, Its a miracle I got this far....
I'd guess the data is gone for good. I'm not sure if you can reformat SD cards, but I've had a similar issue with a couple of USB jump drives and have been able to reformat them and use them again.
Yeah, sounds like your SD card up and died on you. Depending on how important the data is, you may be able to get some of it back via a data recovery service, but it'll cost you.
If it's just camera pics, they should have been automatically backed up in Google Photos (I'm assuming this is an Android phone).
Have you tried putting it in the freezer for a few minutes?
Had that same problem with GF's phone/micro SD card. Gave it to my computer genius SIL, and he worked some kind of voodoo magic on it, and was able to retrieve the (mostly) pictures from it. He suggested not reusing it.
Bad micro SD card, buy a new one and start over.
Source;
I had this happen twice with my phone. Luckily I was able to see the photos when the card was in my computer. Reformatting the card only solved the problem for ~2 weeks at a time. A different micro SD card fixed the problem and I haven't had the same issue since (roughly 4 months I'd say).
You can try the freezer trick, ideally you should put an SD reader on an extension cable inside the freezer, and when it's good and cold, start copying data off the SD card. It's pretty much risk-free on SD cards unlike hard drives, but if that doesn't work the only option left is to take it to a data recovery shop which will cost $$$$.
Take note that this is also how SSDs fail - suddenly dead, zero warning. Backups are more important now than ever before.
freezer didn't work. Maybe go the other way with a heat gun? Probably better off getting professional help at this point....
A heat gun or oven might work, but that's more like using the freezer trick on a hard drive - you could only get one shot and it could be your last.
Well the heat gun didn't work either so I had to go buy a new card. Gone forever are such things as Death Star construction plans, unseen celebrity nudes, Andy Nelsons favorite secret shopping places, and that picture of a BMW M5 towing a 21' ski boat at 80mph.
Gearheadotaku wrote: that picture of a BMW M5 towing a 21' ski boat at 80mph.
We have people on this board who regularly visit Europe, shouldn't be that hard to get another one 
No, not heat gun. Shotgun.
Did you try a data recovery program such as Testdisk? I have recovered unreadable cards with this program but there are others. One thing to learn from this, backup, backup, backup.
^If the card wasn't completely dead, it should've been visible in Linux somehow (most popular file browsers will show a device with no partitions), and Windows would give you a "disk requires formatting" popup. Still worth a try. The best way is to use a Linux computer and run "sudo fdisk -l" before and after inserting it.
Micro SDs are fragile & super easy to kill. Why did the phone ask you to insert one?
LuxInterior wrote: Micro SDs are fragile & super easy to kill. Why did the phone ask you to insert one?
MicroSDs are physically almost indestructible, but if something goes wrong with them electronically, they're almost impossible to fix or recover.
GameboyRMH wrote:LuxInterior wrote: Micro SDs are fragile & super easy to kill. Why did the phone ask you to insert one?MicroSDs are physically almost indestructible, but if something goes wrong with them electronically, they're almost impossible to fix or recover.
What he said. I killed three before I figured out how (not) to format them.
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