Recovering damaged SD card with Endless

[thisaro]

Hi. I would be thankful for suggestions on how to recover files in a partially corrupted SD memory card using endless. Best regards!

[LinuxUser]

I have tried a number of flash memory recovery and file recovery utilities and found all of them to be unhelpful except for one with the unlikely name of TestDisk available from
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I think TestDisk originally designed for recovering corrupted images from camera memory cards.
It is open-source, multi-platform. I have only ever used it under Windows, where you have to run it as a command line utility. The interface is very basic, and it may take a little effort to run it properly, but I have been amazed at how good it is at recovering files from corrupted or dead USB keys and it should do the same for your SD memory card.

These are cases where other high-profile utilities that you can pay money for found nothing, no files, or found something but were unable to recover anything, even with a so-called “deep scan”.

I had one case where, as a result of an acrimonious relationship breakup, one ex-partner had maliciously formatted (probably using a Windows “quick format”) all their ex-partner’s USB backup devices containing personal records. TestDisk was able to recover all the contents, even though Windows showed the device to be empty and so did other recovery programs.

There are Linux versions of TestDisk but I have only used the Windows version.

You should follow the precautions of not allowing any software to modify the SD card contents in place, and try your best to have the recovery program copy the recovered contents onto a different device, otherwise you risk making matters worse.

Good luck

[thisaro]

Thank you so much for the advice. The application is really powerful! I used an alternative Windows based PC, as my Linux-based notebook was not detecting the SD card. As far as I could observe, it recoved almost all corrupted files (useful and useless ones), which is particularly desirable when you have very important files on the disk. One negative point: it does not keep the original file name, so I will have some work to do. Anyway, the most important was that it was quite efficient. Thanks a lot.

[egrath]

Just as a Sidenote for people with the same issue as you who search the boards in the future: The binary versions released on the developers page work flawless on EOS.

To use it:

wget https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-7.2-WIP.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2
bzip2 -dc testdisk-7.2-WIP.linux26-x86_64.tar.bz2 | tar -xvf -
cd testdisk-7.2-WIP
sudo bash
./photorec_static

Follow the Onscreen instructions to recover files from damaged media - the tool also can also accidently deleted files.