Hacking Heavily corrupt microSD HEELP!

[Searinox]

I was writing a file to my microSD suddenly the copy and all of explorer froze. Waited 5 minutes, nothing so took the microSD out cause the system was not responding. Put it back in now it shows as 0 bytes under properties, interacting with it in any way, even clicking it freezes the system for a minute, Panasonic formatter aswell as other apps I tried freeze too, what shall I do?

 

[tedmg09130913]

They say trying to format in it a cell phone might work.

 

[pokemongalaxy]

They say trying to format in it a cell phone might work.

 

[Sonicslasher]

They say trying to format in it a cell phone might work.

 

[arctic_flame]

They say trying to format in it a cell phone might work.


Thanks for that useful and informative post in which you added a clear statement of your own that would benefit the discussion.



QUOTE(Searinox @ Jul 30 2008, 05:05 PM)

I was writing a file to my microSD suddenly the copy and all of explorer froze. Waited 5 minutes, nothing so took the microSD out cause the system was not responding. Put it back in now it shows as 0 bytes under properties, interacting with it in any way, even clicking it freezes the system for a minute, Panasonic formatter aswell as other apps I tried freeze too, what shall I do?

The symptoms point to a dodgy reader. Can you try it in another computer/another reader? You'll probably also need to get a file recovery program once you get it to recognise correctly.

 

[Searinox]

Yes I've tried a different reader, same problem. Can't use a cellphone cause mine won't read SDHC that's all I have in the house. And there was no need to double post that... oh wait, those are two different users. Doubleposting another user's post? Oy, what's this world coming to? @.=.@;

 

[Diffusion]

Have you tried formatting the card with the command prompt?

format X: /fs:FAT32 /a:64K

X = Drive letter your microSD is in.

 

[Tanas]

Download Killdisk which you can get Here
Run KD_WIN.exe and try erasing your micro sd using the F10 option, if you get any errors while erasing then your micro sd is knackered.

 

[Searinox]

I eventually managed to get it formatted with Windows. A quick format that normally takes 5 seconds took 2 hours. After that the computer stopped lagging at it, and I even managed to FULLY recover all the files using Handy Recovery. I was pretty sure it was dead beyond recovery let alone did I imagine data could be retrieved. Of the files I recovered, I ran 10 GB games 7 GBA games 2 NDS ROMs and tried 10 songs, all files seem to be uncorrupt. This is a miracle. Oddly enough I ran a CHKDSK on it after and found no errors or bad sectors. I'm not using that card reader again since it's the only thing I can think of causing this. It's kinda funny cause it's a Transcend original reader, and the memory itself is also Transcend.

 

[golden]

I eventually managed to get it formatted with Windows. A quick format that normally takes 5 seconds took 2 hours. After that the computer stopped lagging at it, and I even managed to FULLY recover all the files using Handy Recovery. I was pretty sure it was dead beyond recovery let alone did I imagine data could be retrieved. Of the files I recovered, I ran 10 GB games 7 GBA games 2 NDS ROMs and tried 10 songs, all files seem to be uncorrupt. This is a miracle. Oddly enough I ran a CHKDSK on it after and found no errors or bad sectors. I'm not using that card reader again since it's the only thing I can think of causing this. It's kinda funny cause it's a Transcend original reader, and the memory itself is also Transcend.

TWO HOURS FOR A FORMAT!?!?!??! Jesus Christ!!!

 

[Searinox]

You should have seen the progress bar, it looks like when ya try to load a broken ROM on a flashcart and it shows a progress bar that advances one pixel every few seconds, I was sure it was a glitch but let it run since I had no other choice. Amazingly, everything turned out to be alright after. I've now got all my old stuff on it.

 

[test84]

So you recovered your files with Handy Recovery and memory card got uncorrupted too?
How come that happens wince Panasonic program couldnt do a surface format?

 

[Searinox]

Panasonic saw the 7.6GB and, like every other program, operated for half a second then stayed frozen for 10 secs. Low level format takes A LOT longer than quick format and if quick took me 2 hours imagine lowlevel. *shrugs*

The format went on for about 20 mins on Panasonic then I checked saw still at 0% though the reader light was blinking. Couldn't cancel and couldn't force a dismount either so I pulled it out of the slot.

The whole system lag was probably because Windows couldn't understand what it was reading off it, though honestly they should write better drivers to handle corruption without freezing. It's happened before with scratched CDs except that with CDs windows kept the drive so busy that it simply wouldn't eject it. Even after a hard reboot(since soft reboot froze on Shutting Down) the DVD drive was STILL busy, prolly stuck in a program loop of its internal firmware, had to do a full shutdown and poweron, luckily USB drives can be removed whenever.

I'm certain Windows' improper handling of data media defects caused both the lag and inability to detect its size, it probably tried to read the clusters' malformed structure which was so-so: consistent enough to deem it as having a partition, yet too inconsistent to be able to read something off it, and that was resulting in the system's struggle.

Phones cameras and so on often don't perform such rigorous checks and simply try to read and write data no matter what shape the microSD is in, which is why they sometimes work where Windows would choke. However, my phone does not support microSDHC and after a pause of several seconds saw an empty drive to which it gave unspecified read errors when trying to write to, and the Format External Memory option was grayed out.

The partition table was damaged by whatever caused this issue, but the microSD itself seems healthy. I changed the reader with the Supercard's bundled one. This one seems okay though it has one problem - when apps like DriveSort or Chkdsk take exclusive control of the drive and lock it, they do not unlock it, and I end up with seeing it as unformatted. Basically the system sees the cardreader but not the actual card so I have to pull it out and put it back in. It's only a minor drawback though.

Handy Recovery saved my hide more than once with harddrives. The recovery, after a broken partition table, an interrupted lowlevel format(questionable) and a complete quick format, was still 100% intact. The only thing that was lost was empty folders, and the root folders' names, which could quickly be told by checking their contents, and the directory structure was also preserved. I lost the recent renames of files in my Music folder, which was about 10 files I had to rename and 2 songs I had added on that same session as the corruption were also missing. The one file which I was trying to copy at the moment of the corruption, was not recoverable. All homebrew, system files, ROMs and savegames however, were preserved.