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My Microsoft Windows 8.1 64-bit computer froze up so I had to shut it down by holding the power button. Then when I restarted I got the Windows 8.1 problem where the computer freezes at personalized settings. Once I finally got through I noticed my microSD card is no longer working. It is noticed by my PC but I cannot write, nor open it. I tried chkdsk to get some feedback from the computer on the condition of the microSD card drive ( mine is letter F ) and it never completed. I tried recovery tools but they all freeze up when they try to scan the SD card. Also my entire computer slows down when I plug it in, programs hang up and/or crash. This is a very important microSD card since I have been using it for 3 to 4 years for all of my work.

How can I fix this?

Edit: I have an 32 GB micro SD card not an SD card

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2 Answers 2

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It sounds like you bricked your card.

First check if you can read your card on an other computer.

If you tried to access your data on at least 3 different computers and if your data is really important, I suggest you bring it to a professional data recovery service to recover your data (for example Kroll Ontrack). If you start messing with it without knowing what you're doing, you might do more harm than good.

Note that I'm in no way affiliated to any data recovery service, nor do I benefit in any way from this answer.

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  • This is the correct answer. If the data is as important as you say you should pay for professional recovery to attempt to get it back. This is a lesson to back up your data in the future! Do not mess with the card anymore as it decreases the chance that data recovery is possible.
    – AdmiralFreebee
    Jan 13, 2019 at 2:13
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Sounds like the card’s controller is busted. Getting to your data now may well be impossible.

Most importantly, stop trying to write anything to the card. This also includes chkdsk and whatnot.

Although I never used it myself, ddrescue is made for getting data off damaged devices. Since it’s a Linux tool, you’ll need either a Live USB (or similar) or Cygwin, which has a precompiled package available. Full documentation is available here, you’ll have to execute something like this:

ddrescue -n -b 2048 /dev/sd_card_device_name /cygdrive/d/sd-card.img /cygdrive/d/sd-rescue.log
ddrescue -r 3 -b 2048 /dev/sd_card_device_name /cygdrive/d/sd-card.img /cygdrive/d/sd-rescue.log

The first command copies only error-free sectors (-n), immediately skipping erroneous areas. The second command looks at the log file and retries all missing areas up to three times (-r 3) before giving up.

In both commands, which contain Cygwin paths, the target files are D:\sd-card.img and D:\sd-rescue.log for disk image and log file, respectively. Because the disk image will eventually be the same size as your SD card (32 GiB), make sure that sufficient space is available.

The block size (-b 2048) is a common SD card page size—2 KiB.

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  • Hello, and thanks for your reply. I am using a microSD card not a SD card and I made that mistake in my question. I hope your method will stlli work for a microSD cards since this data loss is really devastating for me. I'll let you know if it works.
    – user3000992
    Mar 22, 2015 at 16:22
  • This method will work for any block-based storage medium.
    – Daniel B
    Mar 22, 2015 at 18:05

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