SD Card Failure - help required

I have a card which is causing my camera to show an error message. There are some images on there that I want to recover, as it failed while I was out snapping.
I've tried the few simple things I can think of to get at the contents but with no luck so far. I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way to salvage something from this. I need some help, even if it is only to be told I'm wasting my time and should just sling it in the bin.

It's a cheap card (branded Integral), as I needed to buy one in a hurry one day recently when I was out and found that the card I thought I had with me was still nestled in my laptop's card reader slot back at home. To complicate things, all that was available at the time was a micro SD card and adaptor.

It worked OK at the time and so it stayed in use for a while, performing just fine.
At the weekend, I was happily snapping away & then the error message just appeared, so it isn't associated with taking it in or out of the camera or a card reader etc.

I tried putting it into another adapter that I know to be working - no good.
When I put it into my laptop card slot, the usual SD external drive icon appears, complete with the usual drive letter allocated to it, but when I select it, I am told to insert a card into the drive, so I am guessing that the camera isn't at fault (confirmed since then by successfully mounting and using a different card in the camera).

I checked everybody's favourite search engine (Go Ogle) to see if there might be a way to recover the images and I became deluged by the world and his wife offering a million different suggestions, none of which I fully trust.

If there are several things to try, I obviously want to try the one which is potentially the least disastrous if things go wrong.

So, with that, does anyone here on RPF have any suggestions for how I should proceed?

Thanks in anticipation.

 

Sandisk have a utility which I've used with success to recover both deleted files and some files from a card I could not read.

https://www.lc-tech.com/pc/sandisk-rescuepro-and-rescuepro-deluxe/

Sandisk used to give a voucher for the software with their cards. I might still have one knocking about.

Have you tried cleaning the contacts on the card?

 

Pete, no I haven't tried cleaning the contacts. I should have thought of that, shouldn't I?! Maybe it was in the back of my mind that it's only a couple of months old, so it should be OK. But, yes, of course I shall give it a go.

Do you think the software you linked to will be OK on an off-brand card? I didn't know about this type of thing - interesting. However, I'm not sure the images I want to recover are worth that sort of money to me! If you do have an unused code knocking around, that would be fantastic.

I shall try cleaning first though. Thanks a lot.

 

It worked on a Delkin card. I'll look for a voucher.

 

Chris, years ago a friend of mine had a similar problem. I used a software recovery package called ZAR (Zero Assumption Recovery) with pretty good success (I was able to get back many, but not all images). You can download the software at: https://www.z-a-recovery.com/

 

Thanks Pete.

 

John, thank you for that.
I took a look at the site, thought I would give it a go.

I downloaded the software and ran it. It recognised it and identified its capacity, which Windows and the camera were unable to do.

High hopes then!

I got it to scan the card and it found nothing recoverable.
Back to square one.

But thank you very much, John, for your advice.

 

Who needs Eastenders when you have this nail biter?!

 

Painful, though it is, Rob, I believe it to be infinitely preferable to an episode of that tripe.

 

Me too!