Just trying to upload a few files to my 1gb sandisk and found that some files and directories had just become a jumble of characters and after a soft reset my programs that were stored on the card refused to work.
I had the phone reasonably close to my monitor at work on the desk, could that have been the prob or is my card going to die ?
Formatted it on the PC and its back to normal for now. Just re installing everything.
i got the same thing just now. all my games and programs stored on my miniSD card dont work! what the heck?
Is it some form of magnetism interference or power surge or what ? I was plugging my phone into the usb attached to the computer at the time when I first noticed it. Everything had been runnning fine before that.
Hope its not going to keep happening on a regular basis.
It happened to me too, I think it is due to two programs trying to write to the storage card at once, or something reading while some else is writing, or similar.
I wiped mine and fortunately was able to replace most of what was on there (mostly music) but found out afterwards that there was a good chance of recovery.
Try checking out EasyRecovery Professional, there is a free trial I beleive and you should be able to recover files on your card (even if they have been deleted and not yet overwritten).
Hope this helps
Oliy
Hello,
I had a problem with my phone, after removing some software I found that my phone wouldn't restart, (this think this might have been due to lack of space on the programs memory as I had a lot of stuf installed). it'd just stick on the windows mobile screen.
the only way that I could find to get it working again was a hard reset, (soft resets wouldn't work, it just hung on the windows mobile screen).
so, I turned it off, and turned it back on again held down the two buttons, waited till it asked me if I wanted to format and pressed send to ok this...
now the pone works, but i've lost all the data that was on it (expected).
is there any file recovery software that anyone knows of as I'd like to try to recover my old text and mms messages as well as some pictures and documents that were stored on the phone.
Many thanks,
Danny.
Well you are a bit late on this one. The time to install recovery software is before you need it. It can only recover what you have backed up. A hard reset is essentially a total erase and reset but I suspect you knew that. I use Sprite Backup and have several years of excellent results with it. SPB also makes a good backup program. Both are well worth the money and should actually be the first thing you install on your phone.
I've not heard of anyone recovering data from a hard reset. This is actually why most users keep the bulk of their data on the memory card. Good luck.
thezoltar said:
This is actually why most users keep the bulk of their data on the memory card.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What he said...or she. I'm not bored enough to look you up, Zoltar, but that seems like a masculine name to me. I certainly wouldn't name my daughter Zoltar, for example...my son, on the other hand, would do well to respect me in the fact that I didn't give him a weird name.
Getting back to the issue. Forewarned is forearmed. Get yourself an SD card, and a backup tool. It's too late for this round (read: you're screwed), but there's bound to be a next time, if you're hanging around on this site. Also, keep your contacts synced to a computer, and copy the most critical ones to your SIM card, as well. It won't make them appear twice, and it's much easier to get contacts from SIM back onto a to phone than the other way around. At least this way, if you have to do a hard reset in the field, you don't lose those critical numbers.
K bye,
Myrddin
Jeez....talk about silly names....
thezoltar said:
Jeez....talk about silly names....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Glad someone caught that...
~M
well...
I usually say that backups are someting that you tell other people to make whilst believing disaster will never strike you.
anyway... my stuff was backed up to a memory card, but the memory card stopped being recognised by the phone last week,
I've read several stories online about cards doing this. seems that they loose their formatting as the card now can't be read in a card reader and shows up as not formatted. now I'll get may card reader out and see if I can recover some of the data using data recovery software.
Also, I did take backups of my messages using PIMbackup... only after it was too late did I read the developers site telling me that media messages are not backed up because the media part of the message is an attachment.
so I'm left with the end result that my backups are not worth the effort i put into making them.
OK, looking at it from a different angle.
if there is no recovery software that can be run on the phone, is there any way that the phone can be recognised as a fat partition to a computer? then I could just scan the partition with regular tools that would be used to recover data from a normal hard drive.
I am looking for solutions of this kind also...
my PC to see my xda as an accessible fat partition so that i can scan it with a recovery application.. or ..
a recovery application written fro Windows Mobile
dose any one have answers?
thanks
lost data on pda
can I make a disk image of my pda and scan that with a recovery application on my pc?
lost data on pda
can I make a disk image of my pda and scan that with a recovery application on my pc?
It is not too late!
I was able to recover most of my files, after performing a hard reset, using Raise Data Recovery (ufsexplorer.mobi)
This weekend I was driving along and my CoPilot stopped working. Then I noticed that a couple of other apps weren't working and that the camera said it wouldn't take photo's until I inserted the SD card. I've had an 8GB card in there for the last 18 months.
Taking the card out of the phone and putting it in the PC does nothing. The PC at first says the card needs formatting but if you say yes it just says, insert a card.
I took some pictures at a friends Stag Party and I really need to get these pics off the card. I don't care about anything else.
I've tried a few of these "recover your images from a corrupted or formatted card" programs but they all require the card to be visible to the PC for them to work.
Has anyone get any ideas? Please help me
You could try a differnt card reader/different pc and hope that it works then, but tbo if its borked then with paying lots for data recovery, I'd say your out of luck
Sadly, I think you might be right. Looks like that card has gone to silicone heaven to be with all the calculators.
chimpsinties said:
Sadly, I think you might be right. Looks like that card has gone to silicone heaven to be with all the calculators.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App
I would try every usb plug you have on your computer. i had the same problem and i kept at it. it took me several days to finally get it to work & to be honest im not sure why/how it did but i was thankful none the less.
i used this program & like i said i just kept trying. what worked 4 me was i held the card in the computer but only half way which the computer then was able to see the card. if you format the card you will lose everything on it so if you want pics off it & you format it you wont be able 2 recover them.
htccraze said:
if you format the card you will lose everything on it so if you want pics off it & you format it you wont be able 2 recover them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the advice I'll give it a shot.
I thought at least if I could get it formatted then I could use some picture recovery software to get the pics back. It's so frustrating because there are only about 10 pics that I'm even bothered about. Everything else it backed up
hopefully that program will let you see that card, it did with mine eventhough though computer wouldnt. odd i know. i wouldnt apply or mess around to much with that program if you dont know what your doing because you can make it more difficult to regain your images. i gave the link 4 version 5 but i used version 6. i couldnt find it earlier 2 post, sorry. they do have a data recovery program that i used as well but ill have to hunt it down 1st & then i'll post the link.
i bought a hacked 16gb memory stick off ebay (!%$#@&$) that became corrupted and i was able to recover some of my files using the programs below. hope this will help you out.
MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition 6.0
MiniTool Power Data Recovery
Thanks a lot man. I'd managed to find those from your first link. In fact, Partition Wizard actually suggests the 2nd program if the first one doesn't find anything
I've run Partition Wizard against it. It took all night after starting it at about 9pm it finished at 8am this morning. It thought my 8GB card was a 2TB drive but hey, at least it could see something which is more than any other tool.
I didn't find anything using that one but I'm going to try the Power Data Recovery tonight. Fingers crossed.
.......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
MODS STICKY THIS!!!!
Sent from my SPH-D700 using xda premium
I see you took my advice, nice.
PLEASE STICKY!
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App
Thank you to the Mod that stickied this. Sonarchist...you have arrived!
sonarchist said:
.......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
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yikes! I make nandroids before I do anything I consider major like updating Superuser when the reviews are sketchy, or when I do something like apply a new patch, a new tweak, or anything that I think could give me trouble. As I have my phone tuned absolutely perfect, where I want to bring my phone back to normal with a minimum of work.
I guess I am lazy. I nandroid every 3 to 7 days.
mouseglider said:
I nandroid every 3 to 7 days.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
.....you're awesome!.......my personal history, when I find stability, is to live w/ a perfect set-up for as long as i can surf that wave (hence: nandroid every 6 mo's)........but this is being idealistic.........for example, when testing a beta ROM, an average of at least 6-9 nandroids in the sd card thru several versions of the beta, and at least 3 in the Nandroid Folder in the pc (which is altogether another story: visualizing + creating a pc backup that is operative in a worse-case scenario.)
sonarchist said:
.....you're awesome!.......my personal history, when I find stability, is to live w/ a perfect set-up for as long as i can surf that wave (hence: nandroid every 6 mo's)........but this is being idealistic.........for example, when testing a beta ROM, an average of at least 6-9 nandroids in the sd card thru several versions of the beta, and at least 3 in the Nandroid Folder in the pc (which is altogether another story: visualizing + creating a pc backup that is operative in a worse-case scenario.)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I should add that one of the reason I nandroid so often, is that if I do it every 3 to 4 months (on my wife's epic because she travels) when she gets back, I have a ton of updates to catch up on - mine of course is always up to date.
mouseglider said:
I should add that one of the reason I nandroid so often, is that if I do it every 3 to 4 months (on my wife's epic because she travels) when she gets back, I have a ton of updates to catch up on - mine of course is always up to date.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Haha! Same with me and my GFs...she never updates! So if your sd card crashes you will seriously need this tutorial since all your nandroids are there.
Awesome info. Thanks for sharing!
kennyglass123 said:
Haha! Same with me and my GFs...she never updates! So if your sd card crashes you will seriously need this tutorial since all your nandroids are there.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am so paranoid about sd crashes and corruption because I have had my share when upgrading to the next bigger card (had a 2,4,8,16, and now 32gb in each epic) that I sync my epic cards to my PC on two separate drives for both my wife and myself (my PC has three physical (not virtual)l hard drives C, D, E) every 3 to 4 weeks. So for her, I am pretty safe except for those long updates in between her trips home. I feel pretty safe in case I do something stupid, which I do from time to time.
I actually tried to convince her to get an iPhone, because I think there would be less updates than Android, but she won't give up the physical KB. Not that I don't like updates, but I set her epic to be a 98% clone of mine, so we each have a lot of apps and each app is eventually updated and often!
mouseglider said:
I should add that one of the reason I nandroid so often, is that if I do it every 3 to 4 months (on my wife's epic because she travels) when she gets back, I have a ton of updates to catch up on - mine of course is always up to date.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
NITDH.......you don't want that!........(nandroid-in-the-dog-house)....lol
.........arrival of the backup evangelists!
kennyglass123 said:
Thank you to the Mod that stickied this. Sonarchist...you have arrived!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
........a hi-5 to the Mods for Sticky'ing this: thanks guys!....... props to kennyglass123 + xopher.hunter for suggesting it to 'em.............nothing more stressful than going down that gopher hole attempting to recover data, it's no picnic!...........so am hopeful that we can salvage some valuable data + find ways to hinder that inevitable moment when the sd card reads 0%.............as they say, there's many more ways than 1 to skin a grape, or in this case, a corrupt microSD Card.
There is an undelete beta app on the market. Check it out.
Also, check out testdisk for when the partition table is fried.
Also, recuva. Pretty awesome, by the makers of ccleaner.
sent from my always aosp epic
mouseglider said:
I am so paranoid about sd crashes and corruption because I have had my share when upgrading to the next bigger card (had a 2,4,8,16, and now 32gb in each epic) that I sync my epic cards to my PC on two separate drives for both my wife and myself (my PC has three physical (not virtual)l hard drives C, D, E) every 3 to 4 weeks. So for her, I am pretty safe except for those long updates in between her trips home. I feel pretty safe in case I do something stupid, which I do from time to time.
I actually tried to convince her to get an iPhone, because I think there would be less updates than Android, but she won't give up the physical KB. Not that I don't like updates, but I set her epic to be a 98% clone of mine, so we each have a lot of apps and each app is eventually updated and often!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gr8 backup regimen..........'best practices' worthy.........given the 1,000 cumulative hrs leading to your perfect setup, worth all the special handling to keep devices singing!
props on the recovery
Mine took a dump today but it may be a total failure. I just got home and this is what the preliminary tests show. I would appreciate any input.
chkdsk
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
testdisk
Capacity incorrectly showed at 8225kb/8032kb (16gb card)
Analyze feature reports a Partition Rear Error
As a sidenote, the TitaniumBackup sync-to-Dropbox feature has probably saved my butt as far as apps/data goes. I highly suggest using it to protect against dead cards.
Sadly SD cards and USB sticks are very unreliable when it comes to data. They are easily damage and anything slight can cause them to be corrupted.
This is a great guide, glad you were able to restore your data!
Most data in flash type memory cards (excepting physical cracks in the microSD Card housing + damage to the memory chip itself) can be recovered w/ several DIY software programs available on the android market..........ugothkd shared a few of these, several posts up.........in the event that there is NO BACKUP available to you + having exhausted all personal DIY recovery avenues, there are still ways to step-up the process and very likely recover some of your data..........am quoting the following language from Recoverfab (maker of enterprise flash readers to the trade):
'In general, there are two reasons why the data on memory flash devices (cards, USB-sticks, SSD) becomes inaccessible.
Logical damage prevents access to the data/pictures on the drive, but the drive is still physically recognized by the computer operating system. In this case some specialized types of recovery software can help. Sometimes free recovery tools like Zero Assumption Recovery can also solve this problem.
Physical damage causes the drive to be unrecognized by the computer's operating system, making it impossible to access the contents of the flash-memory chip. This type of damage happens in more than 80% of all known cases. These are most frequently caused by electrical problems that lead to physical damage. Flash devices consist of a memory chip and a controller. The controller writes and reads the data from the memory chip. In most cases, recovery is possible from a flash device with a damaged controller and mostly undamaged memory chips.
Formatting is required? The controller of the memory card is not in the position to inform the PC operating system about the characteristics of the memory card. Therefore, the PC assumes that the memory card is not formatted and requests formatting. One might think that the memory card problems would be solved by formatting, but unfortunately it does not work due to the damaged controller. Instead, the computer will communicate that formatting is not possible. Such an error is a clear indicator that no kind of software (including special formatting or rescue software!!) will be able to access the memory card.
.....Recovery Process: If the flash storage device is not recognized in the computer or it is impossible to access the data on it, there is only one way to get the data: unsolder the memory chip from the printed circuit board and directly access the raw data with a programmable chip reader.' <end quote>
OK......that was a long quote!.....worth repeating, if only to begin to address the sort of things that can damage / corrupt SD Cards (+ also to give those of you that really want to recover your lost data super badly some HOPE).
Heat, liquid, dust, some of the things that WILL damage your SD Card (numerous other things can corrupt your data as well) .....then you hear cases of individuals that have NEVER HAD ANY DAMAGE WHATSOEVER...........some burnin' Q's: is the fragile nature of the card itself doomed to failure? ...If the card is going to fail eventually, what kind of data would you be willing to risk storing in there?...... if the data is that important to you, would you be willing to make a 'twin' copy? (twin SD Card could be swapped quickly in case of ER) ..... + lastly, has anyone here found a fail-safe or fairly sound way to run voluminous or frequent data transfers between your device's SD Card + pc?
sonarchist said:
Most data in flash type memory cards............. if the data is that important to you, would you be willing to make a 'twin' copy? (twin SD Card could be swapped quickly in case of ER) ..... + lastly, has anyone here found a fail-safe or fairly sound way to run voluminous or frequent data transfers between your device's SD Card + pc?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yup, I have a spare twin identical card Lexar 32gb class 10 waiting in the wings as a backup.
I use a program that can transfer and/or sync in many different ways my card to my PC, which I do every three or four weeks. It is called FolderMatch v3.44. I am sure there is a newer version out, but the one I have does the job
I simply plug my USB cable into my PC and the other end into my epic and simply choose synchronize, then chose make left folder (my PC) to be the same as the right folder (my epic) - depending on how many files you are syncing determines the speed of the sync. Works good for me!
quick99si said:
Mine took a dump today but it may be a total failure. I just got home and this is what the preliminary tests show. I would appreciate any input.
chkdsk
The type of the file system is RAW.
CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
testdisk
Capacity incorrectly showed at 8225kb/8032kb (16gb card)
Analyze feature reports a Partition Rear Error
As a sidenote, the TitaniumBackup sync-to-Dropbox feature has probably saved my butt as far as apps/data goes. I highly suggest using it to protect against dead cards.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ZAR has an 'unformat' option for Raw File Systems, you may want to explore if there is data remaining in your SD Card that you may want to recover (there's a brief tutorial posted on their website) ........ here's a glimpse:
"Unformat is the process of data recovery from a storage device (which can be a hard drive, a camera memory card, an USB pen drive) that was formatted.
The step-by-step tutorial below describes the procedure to recover data when the drive was accidentally formatted and you want to unformat the drive Windows reports "raw filesystem", or the drive is "not formatted" <end quote>
The above makes reference to a specific type of recovery (accidental format of a drive, as an example), but the application will recover from a number of file types + systems............worth checking it out.
*edit* as another example, 'accidental format of a drive' can also refer to split-second decisions we make when we guickly hit 'reformat sd card' on our device the very first time we ever encounter a 'corrupted external card / reformat?' type of message........in the moment, life goes on + it's only later that we begin to think of the lost data..................however, chances are pretty good that the data is recoverable (files are still inside the 'reformatted' sd card, only unreadable, ie RAW).
I was just this moment ago proceeding to move all the photos that had been saved to the MicroSD inside my GT-i9505 to the PC via USB connection. I was using the default MTP/PTP(?) explorer interface to find my photos.
I must've had something like 3GB worth of photos and videos on the card (I went a bit crazy with the camera in recent weeks!) and thought there would be nothing wrong with moving them off the card and onto my PC's hard disk. The whole moving process took quite a while so I thought I'd leave it to do its thing and then come back once it had finished.
But when I did, I noticed something bizarre - the folder was reported to come in at 2.55 TB (yes, *terabytes*!). I thought it was a silly Windows Explorer bug, but I reopened the window and checked Properties, and yup, still 2.55 TB. The drive partition I moved them to was compressed so I didn't actually need that much space, but it was still worrying. I checked some of the files and realised a fair amount of them were reported to be 3.42 GB each! The compressed size (size on disk) Windows 7 reported on the other hand was only 4 KB. Uh-oh. I tried to open them but Windows' own picture viewer had errors with them. I checked one file through a hex editor and noticed the majority of the file was just blank data followed by a smidgen of data at the very end, with no sign of headers.
So somehow, by doing something as innocent as moving photos and videos off of an S4-mounted MicroSD card, they got corrupted beyond repair in the process! What the hell?!
I'm gutted. Out of a total of 1,029 files and roughly 3GB, I managed to recover only 265 JPGs and 793 MB. Why did this happen? Is this a known issue with the phone or with MicroSD cards? I'm wondering whether it's anything to do with the MicroSD card I used - a non-brand specific 16GB one bought from my local Maplin and in a Maplin cardboard packet (online link at maplin.co.uk/micro-secure-digital-sdhc-memory-card-228011). The odd thing is that the phone and the OS reported no problems with the card, and the photos and videos saved to the card were fine and perfectly viewable on the phone just before I moved them off. As it is, I've now got 2 1/2 TBs worth of (presumably) permanently-damaged media files. Is there anything else I can do?
What I'm using, as follows:
Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-i9505
16GB Maplin-brand MicroSD card
Windows 7 32-bit
If you need any other specs, let me know.
No handy words of advice for next time, then?
This is what i do if i want to move ANY type of file from phone to other storage. I COPY, NOT MOVE files first to the destination that i want to and if they are successful then i will delete the other files from the phone. That way, if they do corrupt on destination, at least you still have originals because you copied only.
Hope this helps.
Yeah, sounds like something I'll have to remember for next time.
I wish I knew exactly what the cause was. It could've been anything - the drive partition and/or its compressed state, the MicroSD card, the rather crappy MTP interface forced upon by Google, the large volume of the media I was copying (like I said, it was over 1,000 files).
I have a small feeling it might be the last one somehow, as the photos stored directly on the phone (of which there weren't that many before I switched to MicroSD) moved across to PC in perfect condition, as did the screenshots I also captured. Furthermore, I decided to do a quick test with the MicroSD by picking a random spot and repeatedly pressing the camera button/icon to take as many photos as possible in a short period of time. I managed to make over 100 before I got bored, but when I moved them off the card in the same manner as before (phone mounted to USB, MTP interface) they came out unscathed and not in any ballooned size.
Has anyone else ever come across any issues with moving large amounts of files at once between PC and phone-mounted MicroSD? The only other time I did a very large mass transfer was with some various ROMs for emulator use to my Nexus 7 tablet's onboard storage, and as far as I know they all came out fine.
It's frustrating when it seems like a problem such as this one is totally alien and googling can't help with jack.