I really stuffed up.. swapped out my SD card for a different one and erased data to install the new one but then realized the old one had photos on it. I can't read the SD card on my PC and when inserting back into phone it wants to erase it, how do I get my photos off this card? Is it possible?
Recover or Read Android SD Card?
![](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/u/38/59938-38.jpg?h=34edff01)
Comments
Can this work even when my PC is saying the card needs to be formatted?
All I can say is: maybe. There are a lot of reasons why Windows wants to format the card, could be a corrupt or completely missing File Allocation Table and it wants to rebuild one. However, some software can just read the raw data off the card, cluster by cluster and just dump everything it finds onto another disk. This method sometimes work, but sometimes doesn't.
You'll want to try and read the raw data, not format, because that might destroy the data further.
I have it running now and it found a 'lost partition' which is the size of the card so I assume this is it. It's doing a deep scan and half way through it has only found a 'Shockwave flash file' I'm literally out the door for dinner so will be back later to check, thanks for the help.
No dice just the random flash file..
If Recuva doesn't work, I've had success getting photos off SD using PhotoRec where Recuve couldn't. The TestDisk PhotoRec packages don't have nice interfaces but are quite powerful.
Gave it a go but found no files, thanks anyway..
https://www.easeus.com/data-recovery/card-recovery-software/…
Haven't used this before, but I have actually used Recuva (piriform, same guys who made CCleaner) and have used it to recover files off a FAT32 CF card years ago.
Do note that how a card was formatted does impact the chances of data recovery.