How To Repair Damaged SD Card And Recover Data From It

SD cards have made it easy to convey the data and they are also a good way to increase the storage limit of the mobile devices. As other storage media are prone to corruption, memory cards are also prone to corruption, and whenever the SD card corrupts or gets damaged, all the files stored over them go a step further to the data loss. So, I’m going to tell you how to repair damaged SD card and how you can recover data from it.

Before moving to the methods to recover the corrupted SD card, let’s focus on why SD cards get corrupted or damaged.

Why SD Cards Get Damaged or Corrupt?

Like any other storage drive or device, memory cards also get corrupt. There are multiple reasons responsible for the damage:

• Abnormal System shutdown.
• Any physical damage to the memory card.
• Virus or malware attack.
• Abnormal pull-down of the drive without ejecting it.
• Corruption in System files of the card.

Whenever the memory card data is at sake, it creates the situation chaotic. At that time, all you need to do is to follow the below methods for saving your memory card data from loss.

How To Fix Damaged Memory Card And Recover Data From It

To repair damaged SD card, you can opt for the following methods and these methods will also help you to recover data from the corrupt drive.

Have You Checked the Basic Connections

It sounds obvious but sometimes the connection or pins of the port don’t get properly connected with the SD card. So, try to reinsert it or give it a little twitch. It is possible that the card gets detected by the system.

Assign a New Drive Letter to the Removable Drive

By assigning the new drive letter the drive can become accessible. All you need to do is to use the diskmgmt.msc utility by Windows. It allows you to change the drive letter and make the SD card accessible if the removable media is inaccessible or damaged.

Follow the below steps to assign a new letter to the drive:

Step 1. Press Win+R and type “diskmgmt.msc”. Then click on the OK button.

Step 2. Now, right-click on the damaged drive and opt for the “Change Drive Letter and Paths”.

Step 3. In the freshly appeared window, press the Change button.

Step 4. Select “Assign the following drive letter” and select the Drive letter from the list. Then, click on the Ok button.

Step 5. Eject the media drive, reboot your computer system and re-insert the drive. Check whether it is accessible now or not.

Check The Device Drivers And Re-install Them

By re-installing the Windows Device drivers, the issue can be resolved. Follow the below steps to re-install the device drivers:

Step 1. In the search bar of the taskbar, type Device Manager and hit the Enter button.

Step 2. In the appeared window look for disk drives, double click on it. Right-click on the name of the device, and select Uninstall.

Step 3. Now, restart your PC.

Step 4. Windows will attempt to reinstall the driver automatically.

Now, reconnect the drive and look if the issue still exists.

Perform the Integrity Test of SD Card

Windows offers a utility that the user can use to check the integrity of the storage drives. The utility is chkdsk and it also lets you remove the corruption from the drive.

To use this utility, you have to follow the below-mentioned method:

Step 1. Connect your SD card using a card reader to the computer and wait for the appearance of the memory card.

Step 2. Press Win+R and type cmd. Then, hit Enter.

Step 3. On the command prompt, type chkdsk g: /f and hit the Enter key. Here, g is the drive letter and you can replace it with the SD card’s drive letter.

Step 4. Now, chkdsk will perform an integrity test of your memory card and it will try to repair damaged SD card.

Use The Recovery Utility To Recover Data

If the issue still persists and the device is still not working then definitely there is corruption in the memory card. In such the case the thing which is important is to save the data. For doing so, you can opt for the Removable Disk Recovery utility. This utility can recover images, videos, documents, audios and many other data entities with ease.

Follow the below procedural method to recover data from damaged SD card but before that connect the memory card to the system:

Step 1. Download and launch the utility tool.

Step 2. Select the drive to recover and click on the Next button. 

Step 3. Opt for the recovery mode and press Next.

Step 4. Soon the scanning process will get completed. Now, you can take the preview of the scanned data.

Step 5. Now, click on the Save button.

Step 6. Select the folders to import and click on the Save button.

Step 7. Provide the saving location and click on the OK button.

Step 8. Sooner, the recovery process will get done and you will get notified about that.

All the SD card data will get recovered using this tool and the data will get saved on the specified location.

Sum-up

I’ve tried to make you known to the reasons for the corruption in the memory card and how to repair damaged SD card. You can also recover data using the above-stated methods and make your storage card data safe from the loss. I hope, it helped you and you can successfully recover data from a corrupt drive.