One thing to know first
Don't let anything repair it. That prompt is the danger, not the fault.
The device is visible, which means the hardware is talking. What has failed is the filesystem, the index describing where each file begins and ends. Your files are almost always still sitting on the media untouched. The damage in this scenario is nearly always self-inflicted afterwards: chkdsk, Disk Utility's First Aid, or a format writes new structures over the damaged ones, and in doing so overwrites the information a recovery would have used to reassemble your files.
Often fixable yourself
Memory card shows up but won't open
A memory card in this state is very often something you can resolve yourself, at no cost, and this page tells you how before it tells you anything about us. Where that doesn't work, the rest explains what the fault usually is and what recovery involves.
What this usually turns out to be
A card that mounts but shows nothing, or shows corrupt filenames, has usually had its allocation table damaged by being pulled out of a camera mid-write or by a battery dying during one. Camera cards are unusually good candidates for recovery when this happens, because photographs and video are written in large contiguous runs with recognisable signatures at the start of each file, so they can be carved directly out of the raw card without any working filesystem at all. The names and folders will be gone; the images generally will not.
Cards from cameras, dashcams and drones. When a card stops presenting a filesystem the files are often still there and reachable by carving for them directly.
Corrupt filesystem metadatabetter news
The master file table or catalogue is damaged. The file content is intact and reachable; the map to it is not.
Interrupted write or unsafe removalbetter news
Power lost or the device pulled mid-write, leaving the filesystem in an inconsistent state. Usually very recoverable.
Bad sectors in the metadata region
The drive is degrading and the unreadable areas happen to be the ones holding the index. This case does have a clock on it.
Encryption without the key
BitLocker, FileVault or a NAS volume password. The data is intact but mathematically unreachable without the key or password.
What to check first on a memory card
- Stop using the card in the camera, and take it out. Leaving it in a powered camera risks the camera writing to it.
- Read it through a card reader rather than through the camera, and check whether the computer can see the card's true capacity.
- If it reads at all, image the whole card to a file on your computer first, and work on that image rather than on the card.
What not to do
Do not let the camera repair or format the card, and do not shoot one more test photograph to see whether it is working. Cameras write new files at the start of free space, and on a card with a damaged table free space frequently includes the area holding the photographs you are trying to recover.
Try this before you pay anyone
Genuinely recoverable at home, provided the device still presents itself
- First establish that the device is stable rather than failing: it stays connected instead of dropping out mid-copy, and it reports its correct capacity rather than a wildly wrong one. A device reporting the wrong size has a controller fault, and software cannot reach past that.
- Check whether it has gone read-only. That is a protective state rather than a failure, and it means everything on it can still be copied off in the ordinary way.
- Never scan the affected device and write the output back to it. Recover to a different disk with more free space than the data you are recovering.
- TestDisk repairs lost partition tables and is free and open source. PhotoRec, from the same project, ignores the filesystem entirely and carves files out by signature, which is the right tool when the index is gone.
- Recover, verify the files actually open, and only then consider reformatting the original.
Carved files usually come back without their original names and folder structure, because that lived in the index that failed. That is normal. Two things end this early: if the device is encrypted, no carving tool can read what it cannot decrypt; and on an SSD where the files were deleted or the volume formatted rather than merely corrupted, TRIM may already have erased the flash, in which case there is nothing left for any tool to find.
How recoverable this is
Usually good, and often very good, because the media is intact and the fault is in the description of the data rather than in the data. The main determinant is not the original fault at all. It is whether a repair tool has already been run. Cases that arrive untouched tend to go well. Cases where chkdsk has already rewritten the structures are meaningfully harder, and sometimes that is what decides the outcome.
What moves it, for your device specifically:
- Whether a repair, format or chkdsk has already been run against it
- Whether the controller is still answering, or the translation layer has collapsed under it
- Whether the volume is encrypted, and whether the key or password is available
- How much has been written to the device since the problem appeared
We will not give you a percentage for your device, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody can know what is recoverable until the media has been imaged and read. What is above describes this class of failure; your drive gets its own answer after an assessment, in writing, at no cost.
What it costs
from $249
USB sticks and memory cards
Cameras, dashcams, drones, phones. Includes carving for cards that no longer present a filesystem.
What moves a job within its band: capacity, how much of the media is unstable, whether the filesystem is encrypted, and how much of the drive has to be read before the files you need are reachable. You get one fixed figure after the assessment and it does not move afterwards. If we can’t recover what matters to you, there is no recovery fee.
Other faults on a memory card
Detected but unreadable on other devices
Next step
Tell us what failed.
Free assessment. Fixed quote before recovery starts. No recovery, no fee. Sydney drop-off or Australia-wide by tracked post.