Baking a MicroSD Card to get Data off of it

[AlphaGamer46]

Hi.

 

If you look at my last post you know that my dad's in a dilemma with a dead MicroSD card that he can't get the data off of.

 

I've seen the oven trick work for people long enough to get their data off of the drive but I'm not sure how/if I need to remove the MicroSD Card casing or how long to cook it in the oven for.

 

Thanks, Alpha. At this stage, I'm willing to try anything for the card.

[Roawoao]

As I said in the earlier thread you should try dumping via the SPI method I mentioned before trying to thermocycle the chip. And before that many many different SD card readers.

 

Don't forget heating/cooling it can break it really bad and is a method of last resort which should be done after all other means of attempting to access fail. Also you probably have to heat or cool it while it is in an SD card reader. Upside down canned air and a hot air gun is what is normally used. Ovens are for attempting to reflow chips. (Be careful if you don't know what your doing hot air guns can start fires, and canned air upside down can cause freezing burns and is also an asphyxiation hazard)

[AlphaGamer46]

2 minutes ago, Roawoao said:

As I said in the earlier thread you should try dumping via the SPI method I mentioned before trying to thermocycle the chip.

 

Don't forget heating/cooling it can break it really bad. Also you probably have to heat or cool it while it is in an SD card reader. Canned air and a hot air gun is what is normally used. Ovens are for attempting to reflow chips.

Okay, thanks. I looked at the SPI method and it made literally NO sense to me. 

 

If we decide to heat the card would a hairdryer work fine? Because if we don't use the oven we don't have a hot air gun.

[Roawoao]

8 minutes ago, AlphaGamer46 said:

Okay, thanks. I looked at the SPI method and it made literally NO sense to me. 

 

If we decide to heat the card would a hairdryer work fine? Because if we don't use the oven we don't have a hot air gun.

Well a hair dryer works too although it might break the SD card reader if you over heat it so don't use one you value. Definitely do not hair dryer your cellphone. 

 

Also before trying to do this try cleaning the contacts and applying pressure to the card while it is being read as these will be non-destructive. Again do not do this in your cellphone. Also getting a reader where you can press down vertically on the chip may be hard to find. The pressure driven route is going to attempt the same thing as a heat/cool attempt just with far less risk.

 

Try stuffing sheets of paper into a disposable microSD card adapter to apply uniform pressure onto the card.

 

All of these last ditch attempts are trying to get a broken internal trace or wire to temporarily rejoin so you can read the data out but at the same time thermal based ones may make things far worse. Uniform pressure will likely not cause any further damage but it has to be applied while it is being read. Applying pressure before you read it is not likely to do anything  might help.

 

http://superuser.com/questions/855876/recover-data-from-card-that-cannnot-be-read

[AlphaGamer46]

1 minute ago, Roawoao said:

Well a hair dryer works too although it might break the SD card reader if you over heat it so don't use one you value. Definitely do not hair dryer your cellphone. 

 

Also before trying to do this try cleaning the contacts and applying pressure to the card while it is being read as these will be non-destructive. Again do not do this in your cellphone. Also getting a reader where you can press down vertically on the chip may be hard to find. The pressure driven route is going to attempt the same thing as a heat/cool attempt just with far less risk.

 

Try stuffing sheets of paper into a disposable microSD card adapter to apply uniform pressure onto the card.

Okay man, will try that and thanks again.

[Roawoao]

2 minutes ago, AlphaGamer46 said:

Okay man, will try that and thanks again.

Oh I edited my reply there is a post on super user that describes it and it worked for one user. 

[AlphaGamer46]

57 minutes ago, Roawoao said:

Oh I edited my reply there is a post on super user that describes it and it worked for one user. 

Me and my dad are losing hope in the card.

 

We've left it plugged into a computer for a while now and we've squeezed it and nothing.

 

My dad thinks it's been electrically shocked and has possibly wiped the NAND chip.

 

I'm not sure but we're gonna leave it because except for the photos, my dad can work on all of his work files again.

 

Thanks Roawoao, you've been a massive help in this entire ordeal.

[Roawoao]

3 hours ago, AlphaGamer46 said:

Me and my dad are losing hope in the card.

 

We've left it plugged into a computer for a while now and we've squeezed it and nothing.

 

My dad thinks it's been electrically shocked and has possibly wiped the NAND chip.

 

I'm not sure but we're gonna leave it because except for the photos, my dad can work on all of his work files again.

 

Thanks Roawoao, you've been a massive help in this entire ordeal.

No problem. The microSD card could have died from many different things including an electric shock via ESD or just wear and tear breaking something critical.

 

I'm sure now you will backup your files. Using google photos supports unlimited uploads if you limit the resolution so it is a free method to backup your images. You should still keep your own local backup as well. My habit is to never delete things and I probably have many many copies of my important data including over 2TB of family photos (my camera is a DSLR and my style of photography is a triple exposure to ensure I have three shots per shot)

 

My backup strategy is a bit crazy but I have one copy on my computer, one on my NAS, one on a portable hard drive, another on another portable hard drive physically far away with relatives, another in the cloud (Google/Amazon/Onedrive), and finally a few LTO tape backups. Basically those pictures should survive quite a lot.

 

For most it is sufficient to have your local copy on the card, then another on your PC, and one in the cloud so that if any one fails you still have redundancy.

[AlphaGamer46]

On 3/25/2016 at 4:29 PM, Roawoao said:

No problem. The microSD card could have died from many different things including an electric shock via ESD or just wear and tear breaking something critical.

 

I'm sure now you will backup your files. Using google photos supports unlimited uploads if you limit the resolution so it is a free method to backup your images. You should still keep your own local backup as well. My habit is to never delete things and I probably have many many copies of my important data including over 2TB of family photos (my camera is a DSLR and my style of photography is a triple exposure to ensure I have three shots per shot)

 

My backup strategy is a bit crazy but I have one copy on my computer, one on my NAS, one on a portable hard drive, another on another portable hard drive physically far away with relatives, another in the cloud (Google/Amazon/Onedrive), and finally a few LTO tape backups. Basically those pictures should survive quite a lot.

 

For most it is sufficient to have your local copy on the card, then another on your PC, and one in the cloud so that if any one fails you still have redundancy.

We're in the day and age where craziness with backups isn't really crazy.

 

Those who have numerous backups are the smart ones.

 

I'm meaning to work out how to back up my Gaming PC but due to my laziness and errors with Windows Backup, I just haven't bothered about getting it working for a while.

 

I need to though, I'll look at it this weekend. Thanks, you've gotten me motivated!

[Roawoao]

30 minutes ago, AlphaGamer46 said:

We're in the day and age where craziness with backups isn't really crazy.

 

Those who have numerous backups are the smart ones.

 

I'm meaning to work out how to back up my Gaming PC but due to my laziness and errors with Windows Backup, I just haven't bothered about getting it working for a while.

 

I need to though, I'll look at it this weekend. Thanks, you've gotten me motivated!

No problem. Also once you get your backups working make sure you check on them to see if you can actually recover data from them periodically as the worst thing is to discover later that your backups were silently not working. This is something even big companies and government agencies fall into the trap of not testing their backup systems.

 

For cloud backups it is as simple as viewing your pictures on google photos. For LTO tape backups it is much more painful and slow to test.