HDD GURU FORUMS

Hey All,

I had an issue (and still do) with my SD 64gb Sandisk Extreme, I unfortunately had my Sony RX100 iV camera initiate a SD card format when changing my settings from NTSC to PAL for video recording, this blew away 30gb of data. I have religiously attempted over 20 recovery products, none of which could restore my data. I then tried Rescue Pro, of whom then said their best tool is FileRecovery 2016, they recommended I call them to confirm whether the product will restore my data, I did such, and the technical staff advised that my SD card needed hardware dismantling to manually reconstruct the .AVI files by hand.

I asked for him to explain how this happens, and he advised they had special tools as SD cards tend to corrupt AVI header records that need manual hardware correction, I asked why this can't be resolved with software and he said because it's a physical issue.

Guys, this sounds so far fetch to me, is there any stretch of truth in this? My SD card has no physical damage, it's near brand new, they are asking for $325USD to perform a dismantle recovery?

Thanks
Chris Firgaira

ChrisFirgaira wrote:as SD cards tend to corrupt AVI header records

WOW

ChrisFirgaira wrote:that need manual hardware correction

WOW ^ 10

Sooo... it seems that all of my hex data from offset 000000500 to 7E5D68CC0 are completely 00's, (half of the 64gb stick) all thereafter is full with hex data. After using all of the following tools I have failed to restore any of my 20-30gb of .AVI video files, I can only seem to recover old data that had previously been deleted.
Free Undelete
CardRocvery
Wondershare Data Recovery
RescuePro
iCare Data Recovery
Undelete 360
Stellar Pheonix Photo Recovery
Seagate File Recovery
Safe365
Picture Rescue 2
Do your data recovery
Data Rescue PC3
Unformat
Recuva
Recovery My Files
EaseUS Data Recovery
MiniTool Power Data Recovery
Puran Recovery Tools

Does this seem strange to have half of an SD card completely 0? the data was written to this card from my Sony RX100 IV, would anyone know (without testing) whether data would typically be data be written across the entire SD card randomly, or sequentially?

I'm not sure if I should simply give up, that I have lost my videos for Archery Attack

Have you managed to clone the SD card or view its contents in a disc editor?

What do the 20 software programs find when scanning the device?

1) take an image of the card, to make sure you don't kill the only copy of your data. I have previously written a tutorial with pictures to do this with the free tool DMDE.

I've inspected the image remotely and found almost first half is 00, the data is recovered in working condition by the rest part which he doesn't need actually.

It's the camera that wrote 00 to half of the portion to the card until he force stopped the reformat.

FYI, Hardware dealing is required when the card has trouble physically.

"If AVI header would be issue, then you would not get a single footage in working condition from the card, the found data is from the last half part of the card.

unlikely the card would report 00's if in fact it wasn't. usually a problem reading flash will show I/O error, not zero's.
exceptions to this is if you told the software to ignore IO errors, and in this case, I know DMDE can report Zero's.

the fact that good (but unwanted) data is available leads me to think the format did in fact overwrite the wanted data.

I don't hold much hope for this case. hardware recovery I assume means chip-off and nands or monolith read at a nand level. I guess if the FAT was showing zero data as in a quick format, there may be data to be retrieved. but video is more problematic to recover. I think the only thing left to do in this case is to read the nands in a chip-off recovery and look at whats there.

would anyone know (without testing) whether data would typically be data be written across the entire SD card randomly, or sequentially?

The data would appear to look sequential when looking at it through utils in windows, as will any FAT filesystem. not talking about clusters being allocated here I am talking about the FS image.

in fact, data itself at a base level is stored in whatever algo's the controller uses, and could involve rotating pages in blocks of data a certain size, pairing blocks of data, XORring the data with a key, or all of the above and more. It would likely look like gibberish in a hex editor