Trying to rescue data from a bad SD card

[James Tappin]

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:21:43 +0100
Eberhard Roloff <tuxebi at gmx.de> wrote:

ER> Damien Hull wrote:
ER> > That's my problem. I can't use "dd" cause the device isn't there.
ER> > I think the system tries to create /dev/sdb but dd can't access
ER> > it. 
ER> > 
ER> > 
ER> > ----- Original Message -----
ER> > From: "Bart Silverstrim" <bsilver at chrononomicon.com>
ER> > To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions"
ER> > <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2009
ER> > 9:09:45 AM GMT -09:00 Alaska Subject: Re: Trying to rescue data
ER> > from a bad SD card
ER> > 
ER> > Damien Hull wrote:
ER> >> Thanks for the info. I installed and ran testdisk. No luck. It
ER> >can't see the SD card. I think /dev/sdb is there but it can't see
ER> >the card. Something like that. 
ER> > 
ER> > If the *device* is seen, you can try creating an image with dd or 
ER> > dd_rescue. Then you can run testdisk against the disk image.
ER> > 
ER> I would google for "free photo recovery" and then use windows if you
ER> 
ER> fail on Linux. Sometimes this other OS also has its merits, although
ER> 
ER> some Linux people will not want to know this.

I missed the start of the thread, so I may be repeating some things, but
I think there are a few things worth trying here:
1) Have you at some time previously been able to read the SD card on the
machine you are now trying? (there are two types SD and SDHC (High
capacity) which are externally identical and the latter cannot be read
in an SD only slot).

2) What do you see if you have "tail -f /var/log/messages" running in a
terminal while you plug the card in.

3) You could try a different machine or a USB reader.

-- 
+------------------------+-------------------------------+---------+
| James Tappin           | School of Physics & Astronomy |  O__    |
| sjt at star.sr.bham.ac.uk | University of Birmingham      | --  \/` |
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