My SD Card Woes.

[Tyreek]

Well, its that time again to let off some steam. While I did drop this at the BullShxt directory, I'm making this in the hope I can get some help. Now in a more detailed fashion, I will reiterate my dilemna.

So after a month of having my new phone from StraightTalk, the problems have reared their head. Most of which, that are ignorable. Unfortunately, this was not. My sdhc card that came with the phone(KingMax), about 4gbs, has been corrupted. :/ I became aware of this as I turned my phone back on after it died on me... Again. lol

To start, I have an LG Optimus Zip, love the phone to death. As for the problems that occurred on the phone(and possibly what caused this in the first place) are that my battery drains, and the OS restarts itself. Annoying, but to my patience, its pretty negligible. Phones lose power I get it. Android phones drain a lot of energy. Ok. Pretty annoying, but nothing I haven't dealt with before. I think the only difference is I never had an sd card for a phone before.

Now I do believe my problem started when I woke up. I turned off the alarm and checked the phone. Wouldn't you know it, skype isn't even on the program tray. An indicator that the phone restarted. Nothing that fazed me of course.

Things went more awry at work. My phone started ringing. Note My ringtone is a song from ME3, which is very serene, so it wouldn't disrupt anybody when I have it on high volume. That didn't happen. Instead, it played a default ringtone that pretty much caught 2 people's attention. >_>; Later on I got a notification message from my email. Note I have an SFX from PSO set for notifications. That didn't happen. Default tone. I checked my phone's sound settings, everything was set with the sounds I put it. Oooookay.

About an hour before my shift ended, my phone gave its usual whine about the battery life dying. I left it alone, since I was too busy. So when everything was settled and I went home, I charged the phone and turned it on. So as the OS loads I see a notification with a memory card symbol. I pull the drop down menu and check.

"Blank SD card
SD card blank or has unsupported filesystem." ... o_o;

Oooookay. I dealt with corrupted drives before. Saved my hard drive many times from following a disk check and such. So I connect the USB and go into properties so I can do my disk check. Usually my other SD card would ask if I would like to check for problems when I put hook it in the reader on my laptop.

"The disk check could not be performed because windows could not access the disk."

... O_O;

Now I actually begin to panic. Usually my other SD card would ask if I would like to check for problems when I put hook it in the reader on my laptop. But that's a regular SD card. This is a microSD, and it can't fit in the reader. >_<; But that shouldn't matter since it can connect via USB right?

So I spend a while googling help on corrupted cards, and I was directed to a few recovery programs. Tried them, failed, tried another, failed. It couldn't scan them or anything.

Well, there's the whole story. I'm pretty sad about it, I had a lot of memories with the pics I had over the years from my old phone. Most are replaceable, but others not so much. So now I'm going to ask for some knowledgeable people who can reach out, are there some options I can do outside of what I done already? If at all possible, I simply refuse to put down money to fix it if I don't have to. Especially if they can't do shit to recover what I lost either. At this point, I can't expect much.

[blace]

I have had a similar situation where this happened and all I needed to do was mount and unmount the SD card to get it working, or in some cases taking the card out turn the phone off, put the card back in and turn it on. It might also be a firmware thing, but unless you can upgrade your phone or have another phone to try it on, be prepared for the worst.

[Tyreek]

Since you mentioned phones blace, I did put it on my old phone. Checked the memory on the phone. All zero. But low and behold, I go into My Pictures, they're still there. Can't access them though. Or move them. At least this is an indication that they still exist. I even tried to force a disk check via command prompt. "The disk is not ready."

Well, this is a sign to not give up at least. I have been given 2 final ditch efforts. One Yahoo Answers search lead me to an interesting proposition of using Linux OS, which the answerer said you would have to extract everything from the card on there. It has piqued my interest. Luckily I have a friend who can provide me with the OS, plus Virtualbox. Perhaps Linux bypasses bad memory messages? We'll see.

The second would be buying a USB card reader. Actually affordable at Walmart at $8-$13. I tried to get it during my work break, but I ran out of time. Next thing I knew, it was gone after coming back. :/ I think I may have a shot at the reader option, but its a very steep shot. But the Linux option I want to check.

[blace]

Good luck to you on restoring those photos, you may also want to do a check on that brand of card you're using in case there are future problems.

[Tyreek]

So an update to the situation. The Linux way... Didn't work lol. I couldn't connect my phone to Virtualbox since it it gave an error saying the drive is busy with another operation. Failed. So I went with the card reader, couldn't disk check it still. This time it tells me the drive is RAW, and can't check it. So I call it a night, since I was too tired and tried again the next day. Found a program known as iCare Data Recovery, which can recover files even in RAW format.

It seems to be doing its job that other programs couldn't. As a trial version though, I only am allowed 10 files to recover. Did a test, and what do you know? Images work. Downside is some are not in one piece, and the images are not in the original format resolution they are supposed to be. I'll take what I can get though. Got my hands on the full version now. We'll see if I can get everything back now.

Edit: Ugh.... An utter failure. I only got to recover JUST 15 files. And they weren't files I was gonna really miss. I recovered nothing from my old phone at all. :/

[blace]

Sorry to hear that, at least they're still there where it counts.

[Aeris]

Some cellphones go dead after a matter of hours by people leaving the 3G/4G service on, bluetooth and wifi on instead turning them off when not in use, letting them stay on keeps the wireless on for them and rapidly drains the battery at a faster than normal rate.

[Tyreek]

This is informative. I didn't know 3G/4G impacted battery life, nor Bluetooth. I have bluetooth on. But I rarely use it bluetooth anymore. I have only used it once since I had the phone.

[blace]

To add on to that, you can download an app that forces those systems off when not in use. Most are free and wouldn't cost you a dime. One I can recommend is Juice Defender, but there are plenty of others that do that as well.

You can also, force some apps to shut down through the settings, but I wouldn't recommend doing so, unless you know which ones you need to deactivate.