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Lost files on my microcard but error says card not formatted!


JackAnt

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OR Recuva error indicates that the format is unrecognized!!! However, Community Members, I just shut down my system for several hours to return to an UNFORMATTED DRIVE and LOST FILES!!! However, dear members, just before this unhappy event, I had gone through the same problems now two times before making the microcard on a Microsoft Surface 4 Pro very unreliable. Comments are welcome.

Anonymous-3.13

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G"day Jack,

 

I'm not sure what your are after?

Help recovering files from a dead memory card maybe?

 

Is all this happening on the Surface Pro?, so you have Windows 10?

 

It sounds like the card may well and truly be buggered. but to get you started, and to get the card hopefully recognisable, try a Quick Format so at least Recuva can play with it.

a Quick Format will put down a new boot record, keeping any personal data intact (well, it'll be in the same state it is now) :)

Backup now & backup often.
It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.
Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last.

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Not exactly my experience (I'm  new here so hope this is right area) but having reformatted an SD card in 4k camcorder, I discovered it was the wrong card. Recuva free version "found" the video I need, and I've followed instructions to recover them...however, the dates and files are shown, but when I try to play them... just a black screen....v. frustrating !  

Any advice welcomed.  

First time I've committed this error in 14 years' work. 

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  • 1 month later...

Recuva free version "found" the video I need, and I've followed instructions to recover them...however, the dates and files are shown, but when I try to play them... just a black screen....v. frustrating ! 

 

It's possible that the wrong content was recovered, either because it had at some point been overwritten or maybe an older file pointer was used, or some other unfortunate corruption.  I had a harddrive recovered using some other software (I'm not sure what, my brother did it for me), and maybe 5-10% of the files had the wrong content, e.g. an image file contained zero image data but instead a chunk of text that looked like it probably came from my web browser cache.

 

To confirm whether your recovered file is corrupt, you can try opening it with MediaInfo (download the "without installer" package because the installer is bundled with unwanted junk) which is great at identifying media files.  If you want to get very technical, you could also try opening the file in a hex editor like UltraEdit to confirm whether or not the file at least has a proper media header.

 

Other options available using Recuva:

I can't confirm whether Recuva's search-by-file-type goes off of just the filename's extension or if it actually inspects the file contents for data signatures (and I can't investigate since I'm currently running a scan right now).  Some recovery programs will even let you specify a custom binary signature to look for.

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