Corrupt SD card reporting wrong size

[bobMuk]

So I've got an understanding of how Recuva works, and since my SD card doesn't seem to have any partition defined on it I'm going to have to do a quick format before Recuva can do it's thing.

 

However... my card is beeing reported as 29GB and not 64GB, so a quick format will "cut-off" the top end of the card and I won't be able to recover anything from that section of the card.  Annoyingly I'm assuming my most recent photos will be in this section (the card was quite full).

 

Any idea how I get around this?

[Augeas]

Before you format try running a deep scan. This works on raw drives. The downside is that there will be no folder information and it's unlikely that fragmented files can be recovered, but you may get something from it.

[Alan_B]

Are you sure you are not a victim of a common scam,

where by a manufacturer creates a 32 GB Flash drive and a "middleman" configures it to report a capacity of 64 GB,

and now that its real capacity has been used up you are seeing the real capacity ?

 

[bobMuk]

Thanks Augeas - will give it a go.  I was assuming that as the drive is only being seen as 29GB then the deep scan wouldn't be able to look past the end of the 29GB that Windows was reporting?  You think it should be able to run to the true end of the drive?

Alan_B - heh, whenever I buy a new flash drive of any type the first thing I do is fill it up with data, copy it back and then do a diff... I know too many people who've been caught-out by that!

[Nergal]

It could also have a number of bad cells and thus can no longer store its full capacity (i.e. time for a new card)

[bobMuk]

So I've tried doing a normal scan and a deep scan and all I get is "unable to determine filesystem type" in both cases. As it turns out, my drive is apearing as a drive letter, but it's 29GB rather than 64GB which previously was the partition size.

An ideas?

[Augeas]

You could try to extend the partition to the max size using MiniTool Partition Wizard at http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

 

I don't think that this will affect any data on the disk. But if you can't scan the partition then that isn't a lot of use. I deep scanned a raw partition a few days ago and it was fine, as long as Scan for undeleted Files wasn't checked.

 

Apart from that no bright, or even dull, ideas.

[DennisD]

You could also have a look at "SDFormatter".

 

SD Formatter 4.0 for SD/SDHC/SDXC: (SD Association)

 

This has the option of a "Format Size Adjustment", but I have no experience of using it on a card which is actually showing the wrong storage size. All I can say is that the  "Format Size Adjustment" can be used in conjunction with the "Quick Format" feature, and I have tried this on a properly designated 2GB SD card, and it formatted with, as expected, no size adjustment carried out.

 

This is probably a "last shot" thing to try, and if you have the available free drive space I would maybe make a back-up "Image" of that card with "USB Image Tool" first, which will enable you to restore the card to it's current condition if anything you try goes awry.

 

USB Image Tool:

 

This will "Image" a card in a card reader, and creates an Image the size of the card and not just the used space.