MicroSD Card Dead. Literally.

[AlphaGamer46]

Hi.

 

My dad has dropped his phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2 god knows how many times.

 

He had a MicroSD card in it and now it just refuses to work on any machine. He also tried it in my mum's phone and she has the exact same phone as him.

 

It's definitely not the MicroSD slot as other cards still work in every device tried.

 

Please, we have many pictures and my dad is a bit sloppy in backing up stuff. We have pictures of my dog as a puppy and want to get them back.

 

Major thanks, Alpha.

[Roawoao]

This is very odd a microSD card is pretty mechanical robust due to it just being a tiny little fleck. Do the pads look damaged or are there any cracks in casing if you look closely. If the NAND die was cracked then your pretty much screwed. Have you checked if there are any cloud copies of the images?

 

Example of a pristine card. 

 

 

[StevenSensei]

Is the card detected at all in other readers and data is missing? Or when you plug it into a reader there is no response? If it is the first There might be some tools that can get the data back as long as you haven't written anything to it. If however it is the second, that there is no response...there is nothing we can do to help you as it is physically dead. 

[AlphaGamer46]

Just now, Roawoao said:

This is very odd a microSD card is pretty mechanical robust due to it just being a tiny little fleck. Do the pads look damaged or are there any cracks in casing if you look closely. If the NAND die was cracked then your pretty much screwed.

No, the outside casing doesn't seem to be damaged at all and the pads seem to be fine, just having a quick look at it.

[Roawoao]

1 minute ago, AlphaGamer46 said:

No, the outside casing doesn't seem to be damaged at all and the pads seem to be fine, just having a quick look at it.

As Papakuma says can you check to see if the drive shows up in Disk management or something as a raw drive or does it just not detect at all on a PC. The partition could have been corrupted so it won't show up normally.

 

Oh and DO NOT initialize or attempt to format it.

[AlphaGamer46]

2 minutes ago, Papakuma said:

Is the card detected at all in other readers and data is missing? Or when you plug it into a reader there is no response? If it is the first There might be some tools that can get the data back as long as you haven't written anything to it. If however it is the second, that there is no response...there is nothing we can do to help you as it is physically dead. 

My dad's just tested it in a few devices but yeah, even in Disk Management on Windows 7 nothing appears. I'm gonna try it in my Samsung tablet to see if it works because then I can get the photos off.

 

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate your help

 

[Roawoao]

10 minutes ago, AlphaGamer46 said:

My dad's just tested it in a few devices but yeah, even in Disk Management on Windows 7 nothing appears. I'm gonna try it in my Samsung tablet to see if it works because then I can get the photos off.

 

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate your help

 

You may have to try many different SD card readers as sometimes they can be picky with some cards. If nothing even detects it then it might be dead.

 

Try cooling it down a lot or heating it up a bit to see if it works then but note that this could destroy it even further. But if your certain it is dead then it doesn't really matter if you make it more dead.

 

I would try using an SPI transfer to try and dump the flash memory or at least see if you can communicate with it but your going to need some microcontroller knowledge or have an SPI to SD card adapter. (SPI is a serial protocol).

 

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-micro-sd-breakout-board-card-tutorial/look-out

 

http://www.dejazzer.com/ee379/lecture_notes/lec12_sd_card.pdf

 

This will tell you for certain if the card is dead if it doesn't respond to the raw commands.

[AlphaGamer46]

2 minutes ago, Roawoao said:

You may have to try many different SD card readers as sometimes they can be picky with some cards. If nothing even detects it then it might be dead.

 

Try cooling it down a lot or heating it up a bit to see if it works then but note that this could destroy it even further. But if your certain it is dead then it doesn't really matter if you make it more dead.

 

I would try using an SPI transfer to try and dump the flash memory or at least see if you can communicate with it but your going to need some microcontroller knowledge or have an SPI to SD card adapter. (SPI is a serial protocol).

 

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-micro-sd-breakout-board-card-tutorial/look-out

 

http://www.dejazzer.com/ee379/lecture_notes/lec12_sd_card.pdf

 

This will tell you for certain if the card is dead if it doesn't respond to the raw commands.

Thanks man, we really just wanna get the photos off of it and my dad's work stuff.

 

I will tell him about this and if he wants to give it a try then I'll let you guys know if it works.

[paddy-stone]

I know it'll be of no use to you ifit's dead.. but try and impress on your dad the inportance of having something as simple as dropbox/google drive image backup is. It takes a few minutes is all to set up, I have had to do it for a lot of my family as they always came to me with this stuff... so now for some of them it's not a thing anymore, they can view their files online on their PCs too, or have them synced to the PC too.

Hope it works out for your dad, I know this stuff is harsh.

[AlphaGamer46]

Just now, paddy-stone said:

I know it'll be of no use to you ifit's dead.. but try and impress on your dad the inportance of having something as simple as dropbox/google drive image backup is. It takes a few minutes is all to set up, I have had to do it for a lot of my family as they always came to me with this stuff... so now for some of them it's not a thing anymore, they can view their files online on their PCs too, or have them synced to the PC too.

Hope it works out for your dad, I know this stuff is harsh.

Thanks man, I'm gonna tell him to try something like heating up the card because at this stage we just want his photos off of the card, we don't care if any apps or anything on it don't come off. Just the photos.

 

Thanks everyone for helping, it really means a lot to me