Accidentally formatted an SD Card, with different file system.

[JoJo88]

Hello, I just joined.

I have a 64 GB Sandisk SD Card, which I use in an Android phone. Earlier, I had formatted it into two different partitions and was using it with Link2SD to move apps to the SD Card. The smaller ext3/4 partition contained the moved apps and was about 6 GBs; the other partition was probably FAT32 and was used to store other files.

Some time back, I factory reset the phone, and installed another ROM. I continued using the same SD Card, and in File Manager, it would show up as two partitions - the larger one for my files and the other smaller unused one which I had earlier used to move apps.

Since the disk space had become low on the larger partition, I decided to format the second Link2SD app partition so that I could use it store files. In Windows, you can format one partition while the other stays intact (for eg. formatting D: drive doesn't affect C: drive). I thought it would be the same here, and so I used the default file manager to format the second smaller partition. It started the process, and then I suddenly thought that it might mess up the larger partition, so I closed the app. When I opened file manager again, I found that it had formatted the whole SD Card (both partitions), and it was showing up now as exFAT. I immediately took out the card from the phone and inserted into the computer.

I tried using PhotoRec to recover the files, but it finds 0 files. I have tried both options, the first as whole disk and the second as exFAT. I have also tried the ext2/3/4 as well as the FAT/NTFS/HFS+ file systems. In all cases, it comes up with the nothing. I have tried a few other software as well, like Recuva, Easeus Data Recovery, and some others, but none of them finds anything.

HxD shows most of the data as zeroes.

In summary: I had a 64 GB SD Card split into two partitions - a larger probably FAT32 that contained my files, and the other smaller ext3/4 that contained moved apps. Accidentally formatting the card has made it into a single exFAT partition. I want to recover data from the first larger partition.

I have created an image.dd file and now am working from that, but I also have the SD Card and can work from that if required.

Please help.

 

[Jared]

Normally, all zeros would seem to indicate something like T.R.I.M. had been run, but I have yet to hear of a microSD card that supports T.R.I.M. Perhaps the phone actually did a wipe of the card as part of the format process.... I don't know. I'm really not much of a phone data recovery expert, as I try to avoid phones as much as possible.

 

[lcoughey]

Apparently there has been some success at recovering data from formatted camera cards through direct reading of the NAND with tools like PC3000 Flash. Yes, even when the card is showing as full of 0x00.

 

[JoJo88]

Apparently there has been some success at recovering data from formatted camera cards through direct reading of the NAND with tools like PC3000 Flash. Yes, even when the card is showing as full of 0x00.

I searched for this tool; it's a hardware device, and not a software program that can be run. Is there any such similar software app that can do this?

 

[Jared]

No. Your issue is beyond anything software can do. Software can only ever request a block of data from the card and get what the card returns. If the card is returning only 00 in the sector, that's all any software can ever get.

 

[JoJo88]

No. Your issue is beyond anything software can do. Software can only ever request a block of data from the card and get what the card returns. If the card is returning only 00 in the sector, that's all any software can ever get.

So there's nothing that can be done? Nothing I can search for on the internet and try out?

Btw, can anyone explain why this happened - why everything turned to zeroes?

 

[pclab]

What can be done is send the card to a lab who owns a PC3000 Flash and maybe they can recover it.

 

[JoJo88]

I've been trying to recover data all this time but haven't been able to find anything.

I used IsoBuster yesterday, and it shows some files found via their signature, but on double-clicking that section, says no files or folders were found using this method. I'm attaching a screenshot; I think it shows that there are files that can be recovered, but I don't know how. If anyone has any experience using IsoBuster, please help.



In the Properties dialog box, in the Root tab, it shows Address, Size (Blocks), Size (Bytes), Offset (Bytes), and Extents as all 0, Attributes as 'W'.

 

[lcoughey]

Wasting your time scanning a drive full of zeroes, no matter the software will still result in, at best, files filled with zeroes. As already stated, your only hope is to have a data recovery professional access the card memory directly and hope that you get lucky and the data is still recoverable.

 

[JoJo88]

Wasting your time scanning a drive full of zeroes, no matter the software will still result in, at best, files filled with zeroes. As already stated, your only hope is to have a data recovery professional access the card memory directly and hope that you get lucky and the data is still recoverable.

Thanks for the reply. A data recovery professional would want the physical card, and not an image.dd of the card, right?

I came across this site called recoverfab which answered one of my previous questions about how everything could have been overwritten as zeroes in the short time I started the formatting and removed the card; it says that it has not been overwritten by zeroes, but the memory card controller was programmed to return zeroes, while the data is still there.

Seems like no software solution is going to work...