How can I recover pictures from my sd card if it won't show up when inserted

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Deb Moreland

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Jul 18, 2014
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I am a mom of eight and have over 1000 pictures that I cannot access. When I put the SD card in my computer it is not reading it. I've tried my 2 Mac computers and my Dell Desk Top. I even tried all the websites for self scanning and recovery. I would truly appreciate any help. I have 7 boys and only 1 daughter and her high school graduation pictures are on that disc. I am just sick over losing these pictures. Thank you for your time to read this.
 

danny2000

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Sep 14, 2010
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Have you tried just hooking up the camera to the computer and seeing if it can access it that way? I don't think that it will make a difference, but maybe. it could just be that the card reader is bad. Can you view the pictures when you only use the camera not attached to anything?

If none of that works, try a program called Recuva but since SD cards have so much less storage space than a hard drive, they often get written over pretty quickly and make them less likely to be recovered.
 

Deb Moreland

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Jul 18, 2014
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The pictures don't even show up when I insert the card into the camera. I called Best Buy to get an estimate on their recovery and minimum would be $300.00. So I'm hoping and praying something else will work. I will try that program. Thank you so much for responding so quickly!
 

USAFRet

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If the card can be mostly read, the above mentioned Recuva ( https://www.piriform.com/recuva ) is probably the best consumer grade tool to use.
 
The experience from most I have heard who tried similar "store" recovery processes is the $300 is basically a service where they send it to a guy. If the guy can't fix it, ya still out $300.

Best thing I can suggest is to use a card reader .... two possibilities here:

Camera is bad and can't read good card.
Card is bad and nothing will read it.
 

Deb Moreland

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Jul 18, 2014
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It's almost certain that the card is bad...have tried multiple card readers, ports, platforms, USB multi-card readers, etc.
 

USAFRet

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Most do, or at least try. The included software pops up and asks.
Of course...if you turn that off.....
 
yeah....shuda been clearer....by automatically I meant something a bit harder to turn off. I once bought an actual HD and put it in one of my cameras a while back ....a little IBM thingie. My son took photography as a minor in kolludge and now he's my hired hand in the photo department .... havent touched anything but the iphone camera in years.
 

USAFRet

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I have a couple of Eye-fi cards. Greatest thing since sliced bread. When in range of the house WiFi, or the primary laptop, all I have to do is turn the camera on. Poof...pics transferred automatically.

There is never a case of "over 1000 pictures" that live on the card and only on the card.
 

USAFRet

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Unlikely. They'd have to hack through a very long convoluted WPA2 security key, as the file was being transferred.. :na:

And for some things....those live just on a regular SD card, for a very short time.
 

a2jc4life

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Dec 16, 2014
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Search & Recover successfully recovered my photos from a CD that had been bad. I'd tried everything I could think of over the space of ten YEARS and nothing else would read that disc, but this recovered most of the data.
 

k10hill

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Feb 8, 2015
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Hi, I'm having a similar problem but not exact same. Trying to load pics from android phone on computer. SD card placed in a sd transflash adapter and put in the card reader slot on my computer. Got the message the card needed to be formatted. I know it is working fine in the phone. I'm not reformatting. So, I've jacked around with it a bit to see if I get lucky, I put the transflash adapter into a card reader that plugs into USB port. Only then the computer never recognized I had inserted anything. I have since tried going directly in the compt card reader slot and now it isn't recognizing I've inserted anything. Moved it to other usb ports. I had the computer scan usb ports and drives for new hardware, no luck.

Also, I've been having problems with compt recently and just yesterday when through tons of scans by different security programs, I uncheck numerous items in startup and service using msconfig (wondering if went to far and which thing might have caused problem), and the security scans did find a Trojan oqdat.exe (I think that was the name). It was quarantined.

Never had this problem reading the SD card before. Suggestions? how can I figure out which startup file might control this?

thanks for any help

UPDATE: Computer kept acting weird last night and wouldn't close to command prompt at one point. I also went and undid what I had changed in msconfig and restarted computer. It is seeing the files on the card again.
 

Kad Cruz

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May 3, 2015
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I am currently experience such case with my sd card. But the one I'm literally mourning for is the fact that I have 900 tracks in there that I intentionally did not back up.

Sorry that I'm not such help, but I *do* suggest you to use a cloud storage. The one I use is Google Drive. I can upload any file I want, but the free version can only store up to 15 gb which is already greatly ample for me. Good luck!
 

Roger Davis

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Jul 6, 2012
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There is a good chance that the pictures can be recovered by using the camera's special USB cable to connect it to the computer. It's often the case that is the only way to get them back. DO NOT do any other data recovery moves until you try this.




 
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