Hi,

Have here a SanDisk Extreme 64GB micro-SD card for recovery of deleted files.

It seems to have a firmware corruption; the storage showing a wrong size of 1Mib.
Strangely the partition size is correctly detected (59.5G) but however cannot be cloned.


The media was initially ok, with correct size, and full analysis could be performed on Windows.
Many files could be extracted, however many being corrupt.
Abruptly the card stopped working, and when accessed again in Linux showed the shrinked 1MiB capacity, which was not the case initially.

Any non data-destructive way to restore the original capacity of the card?

_________________
Récupération de données à Genève
http://www.sosdonnees.ch/

Probably no.

If we compare to UFD one can try an MPtool to restore capacity at the expense of the data. There's MPtools for SD cards too, but access is more problematic as AFAIK most USB card readers do not relay SD and vendor specific commands. So, AND it's less straight forward with SD cards than UFDs and it will wipe data in 99% of the cases (AFAIK).

Maybe.

I have had this happen and by simply trying over and over (power-cycling) some times the device all of a sudden came back with correct capacity. I'd never go for analysis on card directly, and if you'd do I'd use FS information to clone only sectors containing FS info and file data. In absence of FS info I'd clone the whole thing first.

It also appears, or at least some claim, they can do firmware repairs on these ala PC3000 working with SSD (so switch device to firmware mode, load custom loader, etc.) and thus being able to work around LDPC problem. I have seen the claims, I have not seen it demonstrated.

_________________
Joep - http://www.disktuna.com - video & photo repair & recovery service

Hi,

Thank you for your help.
The card was working fine and used as a source (among others) to recover deleted pictures/videos as alternative to a more expensive cleanroom hdd repair. That's why I didn't clone as I would have done it with a defective medium.

I assume the problem could possibly originate by some loose contact with my USB card reader.
I will try again, but with other OS and desktop card reader for better connection.