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 Post subject: Help: Defective PNY EliteX-PRO60 Class 10 U3 V60 UHS-II SD
PostPosted: September 3rd, 2026, 16:06 
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Joined: September 3rd, 2026, 15:33
Posts: 2
Location: France
Hi,

I'm ending there because someone told me there may be people able to help.
My SD Card, short story version: "I love taking pictures with my camera. I bought a PNY SD card ~3 years ago, I formatted it 5 to 6 times only. 2 weeks ago, I was using it in my camera and suddenly I was unable to see the picture just recorded on the card."
Since then, I've tried many thing to recover my precious pictures, I thought I was on the right track but everything collapsed this evening :cry: :cry: :cry:
My card can't be read by my 2 different UHS-II card readers but I succeeded to read it with an older UHS-I reader. I was happy to make an image by using ddrescue, even if the process took 6 days to read it at a very low bandwidth of 0,5Mb/sec. Then, I tried different tools including testdisk, dmde, photorec, ... nothing worked. No sign of any file. I finally wrote a small python code to read the image byte after byte and it confirmed my greatest fear, the image is full of one value: 0x55. So I suspect the card is currently failing at a hardware controller level (returning a uniform 0x55 pattern on all read attempts), which indicates I guess a physical failure, not a logical file system corruption.
I am very sad and disappointed as you can imagine.
I would be grateful to anyone having some useful experience to help me bringing it back to life. It doesn't have to last long, there may be 30 to 60 Gb of pictures on the card, I'm only requesting the opportunity to copy my pictures. Thus, if someone have skills on this kind of PNY SD card, please please please, help me :please:


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 Post subject: Re: Help: Defective PNY EliteX-PRO60 Class 10 U3 V60 UHS-II
PostPosted: September 5th, 2026, 20:33 
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Joined: March 8th, 2025, 18:07
Posts: 206
Location: Canada
Use a USB cable to the camera to access images instead of removing the card. My P15 has a build in D card slot and for other models I use a USB reader. I use mostly Sandisk but other vendors are built from the same standards.

I have many tools for various memory cards. Still there are some limits to what can be done. If the NAND is damaged the risk for loss is higher. I use a Sandisk Extreme SD card for file history in Windows 11. Still works fine.

The NAND on SD cards etc is built for mobile devices while USB sticks are about the same.

Last time I was asked to recover a card, took my machine several hours.

_________________
USB 3.5" enclosures are $19 USD postage paid from China, I own several


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 Post subject: Re: Help: Defective PNY EliteX-PRO60 Class 10 U3 V60 UHS-II
PostPosted: September 6th, 2026, 18:07 
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Joined: September 3rd, 2026, 15:33
Posts: 2
Location: France
Thank you for the suggestion but my camera displays an error message "can't read the card". Actually I would like to understand what exactly is damaged, NAND, controller ? If the card doesn't respond with the majority of the readers, can we conclude its controller is down ?
What drives me mad is this old card reader giving somehow access to the card (but not the file structure). But this "access" returned "0x55" for every byte and I bet this isn't reflecting the SD real content. I need to understand better.
This SD card is supposed to be Magnet Proof, Shock Proof, Temperature Proof, Waterproof, X-Ray Proof, with limited lifetime warranty. It's hard for me to believe it's definitely dead.
I have read somewhere that a few hours at a temperature below 0 can sometimes restore the access to the NAND for a couple of minutes. Did someone have already experienced such a thing ?
If anyone have any other suggestion, I would be glad to test it, thanks


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 Post subject: Re: Help: Defective PNY EliteX-PRO60 Class 10 U3 V60 UHS-II
PostPosted: Yesterday, 22:03 
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Joined: December 4th, 2012, 1:35
Posts: 3956
Location: Adelaide, Australia
'Hardcore Games' is likely a bot, most of the posts seem to be some kind of generic 'advice' coupled with some useless facts. Amazingly, the suggestion to use the camera was not terrible, but likely so obvious to be essentially just as useless as the rest of it's posts.

As for your issue, you likely will not ever find out exactly what is the root cause of the issue, and it really isn't important. Flash devices are simple, IMHO: discover an error, try and get data, bin the device. exceptions are possibly SSD's with circuit issues, but I NEVER trust a flash device after it has gone wonky in any way.

Possible issues which should imply why you may never discover the root cause:

    Faulty resistor, capacitor, controller or broken trace inside it
    degraded NAMND
    firmware fault
    controller panic or fault
    corruption of filesystem or FTL
    malware
    some bug or fault with camera software that damages the card
    crappy card that didn't last the distance

you can try a chip off solution, involves reading the NAND flash itself, then using software to rebuild the data based on what operations (XOR, ECC, Block operations, Page operations etc) the controller has applied to it. To do this you would need a Nand reader such as Rusolut, Nand Reader from Soft Center, PC3K etc

The old reader likely has some simple functions and can't really show you the true reading of the card, I wouldn't take it as somehow the card is almost readable


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