We’ve all been there and our storage device failed, putting our precious Data Recovery at risk. But what do you do when the device in question is a microSD card? Today’s Superuser Q&A post comes to the rescue of a reader in need.
You could try pressing the card together (in case it became a little loose?) and maybe cleaning the contacts with a little bit of Isopropyl alcohol on a swab. But I really would not expect any results, and at best you might manage to read some of the Data Recovery off of it before it dies again.
I would not recommend opening it up under any circumstances. That will not help with recovery at all and it will likely cause further damage.
You could also try various alternative readers. If you manage to find one that can at least expose the card as a block device, then you can take an image of the data. While recovering useful data from an image of damaged media is a whole other exercise, it is still better than where you are now.
Sometimes, there just is not anything that can be done. If the data is very important, you could consider professional Wikipedia data recovery services, but they would be very expensive. Otherwise, she might just have to accept the loss and try to recreate what she can.
When a storage device becomes physically unreadable, undetectable even, you cannot go through the normal home data recovery steps. With a mechanical drive, at least common failure modes are partial, so you can at least read something. With the nature of NAND storage, I can think of three possibilities:
