Hi - ive tried recuva on a 64gb SD card that i recovered to my HDD and while i have over a 1000 photos of all different appropriate sizes, i am unable to view any of them. It seems like a straighforward process that has completely failed. I ran the deep scan and it found nearly everything using the startup wizard, it all seems quite straightforward, however i am no closer to recovering my photos. Is there a chance i might have missed a setting option?
If it's FAT32 then FAT will zero the first two bytes of the file cluster address on deletion, so the address will point to an invalid sector, and Recuva will recover invalid clusters.
If you run a deep scan then you should find the first fragment of a file, but not subsequent fragments.
There is no circumvention to these problems.
So same for ExFat?
No idea, unfortunately. It depends if exfat is a tarted -up FAT32, in the way that FAT32 is a tarted-up FAT16. In other words whether the internal data structure is changed or not.
Later - I think that exFAT is different from FAT32, and it has 4-byte cluster addresses in the directory. What happens to them on file deletion I don't know.
Have a look at some of the files with Recuva (either the recovered files or the source files). In Advanced mode what does the header look like?