SD Card Failure, Can't Read Superblock

Question

Question: What is wrong with my SD card and is it salvageable? at very least to get the current data off.

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Info: I have an 8GB Transcend Class 6 SDHC card that I got for my camera recently. It was working fine until one day out hiking the camera just reported that it could not save and there was no pictures on the card. I plugged it into my computer (running Ubuntu 10.04) and it said:

Error mounting: Mount: /dev/sdb1: Can't read superblock

It is partitioned with a master boot record and a fat file system. nothing out of the ordinary that I can tell. Any clues as to what might be wrong and if It is at all possible for me to recover those pictures? If you need more info just ask.

And no, I did not drop anything.

Answer 1

Looks like Ubuntu is getting confused and trying to mount it as an ext3/4 filesystem (which have superblocks). You might want to try mounting it explicitly as vfat.

mount -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /your_mount_point_for_SD_cards

HOWEVER, I'm guessing something has actually corrupted the thing. If it shows up in your device table at all (ls /dev/sdb*) then you might be able to see if it's still readable with the dd command. something like "dd if=/dev/sdb1 bs=1024k count=10 | less" should give you an idea if it's readable. Even if readable, the ability to reconstruct previous files is questionable.

You could also try mounting it on another computer but that's a long shot.

Answer 2

There's a windows app called bad copy pro that's usually a last stop for data recovery on flash cards.