28 - Recover files and photos from a corrupt SD card or any drive (free!)

• • 1. tip: Click on any of the images below to see them at full scale.

• 1. Enter the Captcha code as required and click on the Download button.

• 1. Allow the file (testdisk-6.10_win.rar) to download.

  2. Open the rar file (e.g. using 7zip) and extract the contents to a folder on your hard disk (e.g. C:\PhotoRec). The 'c' folder is also required.

  3. Now insert you storage device (SD card or camera USB lead, etc.) or connect your USB Flash drive to your Windows computer. The Windows computer should be able to 'see' the storage device. Do not worry if you see a 'Format' pop-up box for the drive - just Cancel it (DO NOT FORMAT IT!)

• • • 1. Press Cancel if you see this message - do NOT format it!

• 1. Now right-click on the photorec_win.exe file which was included in the files you extracted in step 4 and choose 'Run as Administrator'. If you have Windows XP, just double-click photorec_win.exe.

• 1. You should see a Command Prompt window open.

  2. Use the Up/Down cursor keys to select the correct drive. In my case it is a 1GB USB flash drive. Then hit the {Enter} key to Proceed.

• 1. On the next screen, you will need to choose the partition table type that the media had BEFORE it went wrong. This will usually be 'Intel' for any media that you could read using a Windows PC. If you are unsure, always choose 'Intel'.

• 1. The next screen allows you to choose a partition. There may be more than one choice here. If you think you may have tried to 'fix' or 'format' the storage media after it went wrong, then choose 'no partition'. If you are sure you have not altered the media at all and a partition is listed, then choose the partition. If in doubt, choose 'no partition'.

• 1. At the next screen, you need to choose a filesystem type. If the media was compatible with Windows choose 'Other - FAT/NTFS/HFS+'. If the media was only accessible under linux or you know it had an ext2/3/4 filesystem then choose 'ext2/ext3'.

• 1. Finally, you need to decide if all the space should be analysed or just the partitioned space. If in doubt, choose 'Whole'.

• 1. PhotoRec will need to save the recovered files onto your Windows hard disk. The next screen asks you where to save the recovered - just type 'Y' to save them in a new folder located under the same location as Photorec_win.exe.

• 1. PhotoRec will now start to analyse the corrupt media and copy any files it can find to a new folder on your hard disk which will be called recup_dir.1 (or .2 or .3 etc.). When it has finished, you can view the files to see what it has managed to recover. I would suggest you look at the photo's first (if any) as it will be obvious if any of these are incomplete or corrupt.

PhotRec/TestDisk may not know the name of the original file, so if you wish to recover a file which contains text (such as a .cmd, .txt, .bat, Excel, Word or other type of document file), use a search utility such as NirSoft SearchMyFiles. Set the search folder to that used by PhotRec to save the files and set the Text field to some text that you know is within your file. Once you have found a file that contains the text, you can make a copy of it and rename the file extension to the original type (e.g. .xls or .docx) and then try to open it by double-clicking it and see if it works (e.g. .docx should open in MS Word). If the file is encrypted (e.g. password protected Excel file) a text search will not work however. In this case, look at the length of each file recovered by PhotoRec to find one of approximately the correct size (you can use SearchMyFiles to find all files of a certain size range) - then rename it to the correct file extension (e.g. .xlsx) and see if you can open it. The file date of the recovered file cannot be relied upon, so there may be more than one version of the same file, so you may need to open and examine each one to find the latest version.