So I've got a friend that's having me recover pictures from a nonworking SD card, the camera says there's a filesystem error or something. I figure as long as it wasn't reformatted, all the pictures should still be there.

The good news is, I was right. All the pictures are still on the card. When Recuva refused to scan the drive, I let Winhex do a file-fingerprint scan on the card, and it recovered about 2.1gb of files... off a 1gb card. The files were probably well over-copied, with lots of junk data or other files at the end making them bigger. Winhex isn't exactly a recovery program. I tried a second time with a specialized digital cameraFlash data recovery tool, and it also found all the files, but wouldn't recover them because it was a trial version (pay for this? I'm the expert here, why would I pay?).

I don't know what caused the corruption, but I'm pretty certain the filesystem is still there (since the data is perfectly intact) but just corrupted and unusable. If I could just get Recuva to scan through the drive like I've had it do in the past, I'd have a perfect recovery! =\

Is Recuva only able to recover files from drives with a working filesystem?

Hello Falcon4,
Welcome to the forums!!!
I am not a Recuva expert but since it is the week-end, I hope this will help in your efforts.
Have you tried all the different actions ?

As a regular member I have been amazed by the many success stories I have read about Recuva.
Good luck,
davey

I'm not sure if this utility could help you get the drive "recognized" again. I've just posted this for someone with a Hard Drive not being recognized anymore.

It's a free Open Source program, which thankfully, I've never needed to use.

Test Disk:



Hope this helps.