Navigation

[Solved] Fix Damaged SD Card and Recover Data from Damaged SD Card

SD card has become the most convenient way for restoring data currently. The new generation of SD cards for portable data storage devices provides higher read and write speeds along with considerable space at affordable cost.

Have you ever faced a situation that you got a damaged SD card and lost all important data on it? When the SD memory card gets damaged or formatted, all stored photos, music, videos and other documents will be gone.

Here in this post, we are going to talk about how to get lost files back from damaged SD cards.

Damaged SD Card

Part 1. How to repair damaged SD card without data loss

There are several factors could cause a SD card damaged, like immersion in water, falling down, electrical surges or virus and malware. And if the following phenomenon occurs, the SD card is likely to have been damaged:

1. Most files stored on the SD card are missing.

2. When you try to open the SD card through digital devices, no folder or file appears.

3. The error message said Read/Write error on SD card or Memory card error shows up, when you plug it into your smartphone or digital camera.

4. You can see the files on SD card, but unable to open or copy them.

5. Your smartphone, computer or digital camera does not recognize the SD card at all.

When you are sure the SD card is corrupt, you can try chkdsk command to repair damaged SD card.

Repair damaged SD card

Step 1. Make sure you have log in your computer as Administrator. Insert the SD card into your computer.

Step 2. Unfold the Start menu, search for cmd and open the command prompt window.

Tip: if you did not log in your PC as Administrator, you have to run the cmd window as Administrator.

Step 3. Input the command "chkdsk /X /f [sd card letter:]" and press the Enter key.

Step 4. Wait until you see Windows has made corrections to the file system in the command prompt window. That means the damaged SD card is fixed successfully. If not, you have to try recovering data from corrupt SD card with a third party tool.

You may also want to know: Ways to solve SD card stopped working

Part 2. Recover data from damaged SD card

Even though a SD memory is corrupted for software or hardware issues, there are chances to get data back from a damaged SD card. When you insert the SD card into your computer and discovered the files disappeared, they are actually still stored on the SD card. But you cannot open, view or copy the files without a professional SD card recovery tool.

There are several professional SD card data recovery tools on market. You can search them in Google search engine. In order to help you learn about how to recover data from damaged SD card, we will use Apeaksoft Data Recovery as well as Disk Drill for Windows as the example. It is a dedicated SD memory recovery application for PCs running Windows 7/8/8.1/10.

How to recover data from damaged SD card with Apeaksoft Data Recovery

Apeaksoft Data Recovery

  • It is strong to recover the deleted files from USB flash drive, recycle bin, hard drive, memory card, etc.
  • It recovers images in JPG, TIFF/TIF, PNG, BMP, GIF, PSD, CRW, CR2, NEF, ORF, RAF, SR2, MRW, DCR, WMF, DNG, ERF, RAW, etc.
  • It retrieves the media files in the formats of AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, SWF, MPG, AIFF, M4A, MP3, WAV, WMA, MID/MIDI, etc.
  • Documents like DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX, PDF, CWK, HTML/HTM, INDD, EPS, etc. are recoverable.
  • Email and other data like ZIP, RAR, SIT, and more are supported to get back.
  • Compatible with Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP (SP2 or later).
Download for WinDownload for Mac

Step 1. Download, install and run Data Recovery on your computer. Insert your damaged SD card to computer.

In the main interface, you need to checkmark the data type. Then you need to select the hard drive disk where you deleted the data for scanning. Here, for SD card, you just need to check the Removable Drives.

Finally, click Scan to start the deleted files on the damaged SD card.

Scan

Step 2. When the scanning process is complete, you will see all the scanned data type folders. Choose the data type that you want to recover in SD card, and click Recover button to start to find back the deleted files to your computer.

Recover from Damaged SD Card

Watch the video to learn more about how to recovcer data from damaged SD card with Data Recovery:

Data Recovery on WindowsPlay

You have to admit that, even use the best data recovery tool, you still can't sure get 100% chance to get all lost data back. So it's quite necessary to backup various files on SD card.

Part 3. How to backup SD card

To avoid data loss on damaged SD cards, the best way is to back up your smartphone and SD card frequently. Unlike iPhone, Android does not have dedicated backup features, which is the biggest obstacle to back up Android data. According to a recent survey, 8 in 10 Android users said that they are more likely to backup Android and SD card, if there is an easy-to-use tool. Apeaksoft Android Data Backup & Restore is such a professional backup solution for Android users. It has the capacity to backup files on both internal storage and SD card to local hard drives in one click.

Free Download Free Download

Step 1. Prepare software and hardware

Android Data Backup & Restore is available to Windows and Mac. You can download and install the right version to your computer based on the operating system. Then hook up your Android phone with SD card to the computer using USB connection.

Step 2. Go to backup mode

Launch the Android tool kit and tab Android Data Backup & Restore on the main interface.

Tip: To establish the connection between Android and Android backup tool, you have to turn on the USB debugging mode on your phone, which is usually located in Settings > Developer Options.

Android Data Backup & Restore

Step 3. Backup SD card before damage in one click

Once click on One-click Backup button, current files stored in SD card and internal memory will be synced to your computer.

Step 4. View backup data

Select the recent backup file and click on the Start button to go to detail window. Here you can view all backup files based on categories.

backup data

Conclusion

Though many people feel it convenient to expand storage capacity of digital cameras or Android phones with SD cards, they have limited number of lifespan. A flash card unit, for example, has about 10,000 write/erase operations. They are vulnerable to physical damages too. So, we suggest you to back up your SD card with Android Data Backup & Restore frequently.

As you can see, it is rather easy and all you need to do is only one click. On the other hand, if something unfortunate happened, you can try to repair it following our guides. Data recovery from a damaged SD card is another option to avoid data loss when SD memory is corrupt. In a word, you might grasp all necessary knowledge about data protection on damaged SD card after reading this article.

More Reading