Hardware SD card got corrupted, can anyone give me advice?

[Cyber Akuma]

Ok, so I haven't used my Wii in a while, and I always wanted to upgrade it's 16GB card to a 32GB one.

So I got some good 32GB cards last Black Friday, and when I put the 16GB card in my PC to make a backup, it kept crashing and failing to read it, so I (stupidly) ran a chkdsk and it found a T.R. Tolken novel's length of errors, and it kept deleting supposedly inaccessible folders left and right.

I tried to copy what I could, but a lot of it was useless, and about all I recovered was my homebrew apps, which I don't care about since I can just re-download those from the homebrew channel anyway (plus I am pretty sure a lot of individual files on said apps got corrupted too anyway, so they would just crash if I tried to use them).

Unfortunately, the "private" folder was one of these corrupted folders. From what I understand, this is where the Wii places any official non-homebrewed data, right?

Thankfully, all of my savegames are on the Wii's internal memory (I think.... REALLY hope that didn't get corrupted), so at least my savegames are still there, but I had moved pretty much ALL of my both official and unofficial Wiiware to my SD card.

Is there any way to recover this? Or even tell what I had installed as WiiChannel/WiiWare data? Would I even be able to reinstall this without the app store?

Or perhaps, could there be any chance (highly highly doubt it, especially since I ran a chkdsk) to recover the SD card?

 

[GerbilSoft]

Try using TestDisk: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

TestDisk itself can usually recover files from reformatted/corrupted FAT32 directories.

TestDisk also includes PhotoRec, which doesn't depend on file system remnants, but that can only recover files with known headers. (Wii save files in /private/ are encrypted, so PhotoRec won't find them.)

 

[Chris Barter]

Here's how you can recover back all data from a SD card -

 

[GerbilSoft]

Here's how you can recover back all data from a SD card

Somehow I don't think a program by a company called "Sony Picture Recovery" is trustworthy.

 

[thorasgar]

After you are done with all your recovery tasks do not use the card until you format it with the Panasonic SD Formatter. Make sure you have a quality card reader.