Looking for help to repair the microsd card within an old R4 cart.

[Kwyjor]

The kernel that @JORGETECH sent in this thread shows as 44,8 MB on Windows, and your raw .img file shows as 45,8 MB. Only a MB difference. I assume that you only had the kernel installed on that microSD card, and nothing else. Maybe a few .sav files but that wouldn't make a sense since you literally can't do anything with .sav files without the rom itself. At least this is my theory.

The list of files in the earlier post is already at least 22 MB. Or are all those files already part of the kernel?

 

[reha]

The list of files in the earlier post is already at least 22 MB. Or are all those files already part of the kernel?

I guess so, they've only found the half of the kernel installed on their card. Maybe this isn't the case but I think it makes sense. There still might be a way to recover the other files though, since OP might have deleted their save files in the past. But the only thing that is currently accessible on the card (if the filesystem wasn't corrupted) would be the kernel itself. The other deleted files would be inside of the lost/deleted partition of the .img file since they were deleted.

 

[Kwyjor]

Wait a minute. If this is supposed to be a complete sector-by-sector dump of the SD card, shouldn't it 4 GB?!

The other deleted files would be inside of the lost/deleted partition of the .img file since they were deleted.

There's no such thing as a "lost/deleted partition of an .img". Even space marked as empty by the OS can still contain data.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Yeah the image dump is too small. Also I never said to write the image back....especially if what you have doesn't appear to be the correct size. If it's failing to read sector's past the 48MB or so mark, then that sounds like a physical defect. Unfortunately you are boned in that case as unlike old style hard-drives there isn't much in terms of data recovery you can do when the the flash cells in microSD cards die like that.

That or you didn't do the dump correctly....which is probably what happened. Sector 0 is not present in this dump and appears to contain garbage data for the most part (though the start of it does look a lot like the starting portion of a NTR banner used in NDS rom images). I don't know where you obtained this file from but it definitely looks nothing like what win32diskimager would put out...

It's possible you might have pointed the program to the wrong drive letter?

 

[Kwyjor]

TRiD is 100% confident that this "recovery.img" is an Adobe Photoshop Brush, but unfortunately I do not have Photoshop on hand to verify.

ETA: AbrViewer can't open it, so, maybe TRiD is not as reliable as I thought it might be.

 

[reha]

There's no such thing as a "lost/deleted partition of an .img". Even space marked as empty by the OS can still contain data.

Ah, my bad then. But the term "deleted partition" is the exactly same thing that you're saying, a partition which still has some data, but is flagged as free space. This can be caused by deleting the file from the file explorer. "lost partition" is basically storage device losing a partition, it can be caused by filesystem/partition table being corrupted due to a physical damage. Since .img's have sector by sector data, it still should be possible to find out the deleted or lost partition from it. That's what I actually meant, but it looks like OP kinda messed up while trying to dump the card, or the card was messed up for life after all...

 

[angelicshadowdemon]

Both options seem quite likely to be honest. I've never accessed the files of this card before, and like I said it used to be a fully functional r4 cart with games on until it just stopped working a few years ago (after not having used it for several years).
Never used win32diskimager before and did have to google some help so very likely I messed up the read somehow, though it was 100% pointed at the right drive letter, the only one it let me select was the card (Can't open it without reformatting.)

TRiD is 100% wrong in this case, I don't have photoshop installed on this pc (or any, I think).

By the looks of it I'll have to rebuild this cart from scratch though. I'll probably hop on here if I need help with that, otherwise I'm just gonna have to wait until I find a small and cheap microsd card.

I do have a vague memory of pulling an sd card out of one of these carts while it was in the ds, though a) no idea which one and b) could be a false memory that never actually happened.

 

[Kwyjor]

Of course win32diskimager is not the only option – I'm just not sure what the other options would be. In Linux you would use dd; I'm not sure if there's a good version of dd available for Windows. (You could boot a "live" Linux distribution, or install Ubuntu for Windows, and then use dd that way, probably.) Winimage comes to mind, but that's shareware and I'm not sure if you can use it to image a damaged card without paying for it – if you can use it for data recovery at all.

 

[angelicshadowdemon]

Never used linux in my life, so unless that's my only option left with a high success rate I might just have to give up. Tried running win32diskimager again and changing the hash each time (I have no idea what that does), end results attached. They show up as just 'file' insead of the .img I got last time but are all the same size as the original image.

The small save file could be related to the fact I only would have played a few games on the cartrige.
I tried Easus first for file recovery and it didn't even see the sd card.

Here's a .zip of all the files I recovered from the card.

All the hex editor is doing is giving me gibberish, like what I saw when I opened it in notepad. If you think a specific file will open with readable text let me know!

Recuva didn't work, it couldn't identify the file type.

From the looks of things this might be the closest we can get to any recovered files from the card. Ifanyone can help out with the hex editor I'd appreciate it.

 

[reha]

Never used linux in my life, so unless that's my only option left with a high success rate I might just have to give up. Tried running win32diskimager again and changing the hash each time (I have no idea what that does), end results attached. They show up as just 'file' insead of the .img I got last time but are all the same size as the original image.

From the looks of things this might be the closest we can get to any recovered files from the card. Ifanyone can help out with the hex editor I'd appreciate it.

I don't really understand why you're insisting on not using Linux like you can watch a tutorial on YouTube for installing/using the recovery program. Maybe try backing up the card to an image file by using another program than win32diskimager, the file size of the image file should match the capacity of the card.

 

[angelicshadowdemon]

Linux always sounded like a very "Only if you know what you're doing" kind of option and as I very much don't I wanted to avoid it. If it is actually pretty beginner friendly then I'll give it a go. I'll look for other programs to create an image file and hope for the best!

Found another program and it's detecting the card to be 45.8mB. It could possibly be the adaptor that I'm using causing the problem? I could try using an SD card adaptor instead of this USB/C one.

Nope, that wasn't it. Results included anyway.

One barrier for the linux liveCD/USB is tracking down a big enough unused usb in my house. Otherwise it's on hold until I can get my hands on one.

I've also been fairly off and on busy since the creation of the thread, but should have a decent amount of free time to dedicate to this and other more complicated projects quite soon (This has been a major barrier).

 

[Kwyjor]

Found another program and it's detecting the card to be 45.8mB.

That's very strange and I would be inclined to give up now if you hadn't already managed to recover some files.

Weren't you using Testdisk before? It looks like Testdisk can create images. Note that you will want to image the entire "drive", not just one partition.
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Image_Creation
https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=6960

One barrier for the linux liveCD/USB is tracking down a big enough unused usb in my house.

As I said, you can just install Linux in Windows if you are running Windows 10/11. This is quite painless.
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-on-wsl2-on-windows-10
https://ubuntu.com/wsl