So my daughter's 8GB SDHC card (Intenso, Class 4) has died, and along with it her last two years of photography memories....
When inserted into a Windows machine (tried four different machines with different card readers), the system can barely detect the card (but it will not show up as hard disk) and diskmanager reports the correct size, but other than that, diskmanager only sees unallocated space. Eventmanager reports hundreds of errors, some mentioning controller errors.
I tried various utilities that claim to be able to recover low-level data, including some command line tools on a Linux machine (TestDisk, PhotoRec) which took a full weekend to recover zero bytes. With that, it seems likely that there is a hardware error.
I started to read up on such things and found people that unsolder the NAND chips to bypass the possibly broken controller and then read raw data from those and assemble files eventually. Unfortunately, they charge around 150-200 bucks, which is a lot of money for us.
Then I realized there are NAND flash readers for about 100 bucks (such as
this one) - and now I wonder whether I might spend about the same amount of money if I do it myself - but then I have also learned something new!
Any thoughts or suggestions on how to proceed with that?
Thanks!