[Solved] No Access to Samsung Galaxy S8, SanDisk Extreme Pro 32GB Micro SD Card Contents for Photos

Hello,

Today I ran into a very annoying problem that prompted me to start this topic. My work has forced me to photograph intensively in the last few days. I took photos with my Samsung Galaxy S8 phone and saved them on a SanDisk Extreme Pro 32 GB micro SD memory card. Everything was fine while shooting, I was able to view and delete them. Today, to protect my work, I decided to copy them to a laptop. Before copying, I wanted to go through the last few photos on the phone and here was the problem. The last few photos came out dimly (poor sharpness). It had happened before, but usually it took a few seconds to read. I decided to close and reopen the photo application. It turned out that the phone does not see any previously taken photos. From then on, he hadn't seen the memory card itself either. Restarting the phone and removing and inserting the card did nothing.

I am far away from home and did not have an adapter at hand. I was able to purchase an adapter that connects my micro SD card to my laptop via a USB connector. And here's another problem. The laptop sees the card as a removable drive F :, but does not display its capacity. The green bar showing the card is loading almost reaches the end of the window but stops. Right clicking on this drive causes Windows Explorer to crash. Similarly, the disk management utility does not display disk status information when the adapter with the card is attached. Also, Safe Hardware Removal refuses to work. All problems are solved by removing the adapter from the USB port.

I came across a lot of threads about memory cards in this and other forums, but not a problem identical to mine. Somewhat in the dark, I tried to use two programs. The first of them - Recuva does not see this disk (card) at all. The ZAR X sees the card, detects its model and capacity, but when it starts scanning sectors, it detects the first as "bad sector" and stops there. The device manager can also see the card, its model and capacity. The card and the phone never suffered any mechanical damage. I looked carefully at the card and cleaned it, no signs of damage or melting. Let me add that my laptop is a Dell XPS 9570 i7-8750H, 16 GB, GTX 1050Ti, Windows 10 Pro.

Has anyone encountered a similar problem? I would like to believe that the photos stored on the card are recoverable, they are quite important to me. I will be grateful for any suggestions and help.

If ZAR sees the card, try to make a cross-sector copy. Preferably from Linux, eg using DMDE. If you are unsuccessful, it may be worth asking for help from a data recovery company. The card is about to end its life and maybe it is still possible to make a copy of it without difficult and expensive methods.

Sector-specific copy to file and recovery from copy:
www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic1330304.html

Thanks for the tips. I downloaded the DMDE program, recognized the memory stick and started backing it up. The process is taking a long time, I started it yesterday around 23 and has copied 14% (4.5 GB) by now. So far, it has detected over 32 thousand. "bad" sectors and almost 4 million "good" sectors. I will report when the copying process is over.

DMDE is slowly finalizing its cross-sector backup. Tomorrow should be complete. At the moment, there are almost 50 million healthy sectors and 83 thousand. bad. What program can most effectively try to recover data from a backup with so many bad sectors? Use the DMDE only option or look for something better? I would like to offer suggestions for programs running on Windows 10.

Try all three in a row:
DMDE, Testdisk and Photorec
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Main_Page

I was able to recover all or the overwhelming majority of my photos with DMDE, unfortunately virtually all of them are damaged by bad sectors. The photos are cropped, have changed colors and have graphic artifacts on them. I understand that at this point the fun is over, because the JPG files themselves have been damaged?

You can try with the other programs I have given, but don't make too much promise.

The photo will be corrupted if there was one or more of the damaged sectors. Insert sample damaged photo.

I tried unsuccessfully to recover photos from the sectoral copy with several programs. As suggested, the photos were damaged by bad sectors. During the scan, bad sectors appeared gradually over the entire volume of the memory card, not in larger groups. It was reflected in all photos. An example is attached below. I don't think there's anything else you can do about it. If no one has ideas, the topic is closed.

You can read unread sectors.

This is probably the only option, otherwise it is fun in photo processing programs. 6 bad sectors.

How (with what software) can this be done? This fixed picture looks great, I didn't think you could get this effect. Let me add that I would like to work with the copy in the bin file that I managed to make. The card is no longer visible even in DMDE, I think it "died" completely.

That's how I improved in 5 minutes, because in total, it will be faster to add / correct the missing MCU in the graphics program. Without a correction in graphics programs (also quickly), after just 2 minutes in JRS it looks more or less - these "holes" are the result of lack of data. You can see exactly 3 sectors of damage (3 times 2 sectors). JRS is enough for quick repair of "shifted photos" and color correction. In this case, I had to edit a few more bits in the third failure, because the program did not want to restore the "third part of the file":

The photos were recovered using DMDE. To repair damage caused by bad sectors, the JPEG Repair Shop indicated in the post above was enough.