Hi all,
I looked around this site for a long time before posting but forgive me if this has been covered here.
I'm attempting to recover pictures from a SDHC 8 GB SD card. When inserted into several readers the card was recognized and Explorer sees four separate volumes. I've tried loading it as local evidence in EnCase but the volumes are red and listed as 'not ready'. With other programs and the Window Disk Manager I can see the volumes but cannot access them.
The card appears to be in good physical shape and I've checked to make sure that the card readers and my Windows XP hasvebeen updated to read SDHC.
Any thoughts greatly appreciated.
Firstly… Those volumes are not volumes ;). Many card-readers add a drive for every slot they have no matter whether a card is inserted or not.
For your card you should try Linux and see what "dmesg" displays. I had many(!) hard-disks and other media which were not recognized under windows but could be imaged flawlessly with Linux (any distribution should do).
Even if the volume is not mounted (unknown file-system or so) you might be able to dump the raw data.
Cards do fail this way. I have seen several and never managed to recover anything.
The next approach (and I do not know any results) is to remove the chip and use specialised memory chip reading eqipment. Will require a specilaist company
Thanks for the responses. Apparently the SD card has been taken to a photo recovery business and they were unable to do anything with it.
I was able to view the reader's three slots (not volumes - thanks for the clarification) using dmesg in Ubuntu but couldn't mount the card. It shows as 'no media detected' for the SD slot.
Do you know of a way that I could extract any raw data from the card in this case?
Thanks for your help.
I think you will find it is a physical/electrical problem, rather than any driver or software issue. Hence, the next stage is major surgery. Make sure anyone who offers to do it has a no fix no fee policy.