SD Card Cannot Be Read: Data Recovery Tips

Expandable storage such as SD card is truly helpful to boost storage capacity for our cell phones or cameras. But they are fragile and when a card stops working, you can lose a lot. We will go through some common causes of SD card failures and share some tips on how to fix it.

1.First, we need to make sure that the SD card is actually at fault. If you've inserted an SD card into your laptop or PC's built-in slot and nothing happens, try using a USB card reader and try different ports. Connect your SD card to another device if you have access to one.

2.Write-protection mode is on. If the files can be read but not be saved, it is probably locked on write-protection mode. Unlock the switch to turn off write-protection.

3. Metal wires in the card slot are corrupted or twisted. Many SD cards support hot plug, which means you can insert or remove the card while the device is still running. But frequent plug and unplug can result in twisted or rusty metal wires in the card slot. Use a needle to straighten the wires if they are bend or remove the rust if they are rusty.

4. SD Card is Not Clean. Dirt or oil stain can cause the SD cards undetectable by computers. Check whether there are dark spots around the metal area of the card. Clean with alcohol or water. Then, dry it out before put it back to the phone.

5. Card Slot is Squeezed by non-original battery which is too thick to be fit in.
It squeezes the card slot and causes problems to the normal use of SD cards. Change back to an original battery to see if the SD cards can work again.

6. Check if your card is shown up in Disk Manager. You can open Disk Management by typing diskmgmt.msc into the Run dialog and press Enter.If it is there, see if Windows has assigned any drive letter to it, manually assign a letter to it if not. Read the detailed article about how to fix Disks not Detected or Recognized

Windows may suggest that you format the unrecognized disks. It will solve most of the problems but you will lost all your files in it during the process. You can always go back to your backup files if available. If not, you can use one of the data recovery software to retrieve all your lost files. We will show you how to recover files from formatted SD cards using Hdata Software.

1. Download and install Hdata Recovery. Click on the "Deleted Your files From Flash Disk".

2. Hdata Recovery will list all the SD cards, XD cards or USB Flash drives it detected. Select the SD card you wish to recover data from. Hit Next to proceed with the scanning.

3. After the scan, select the files you wish to recover and choose a path to save them. Do not save the files onto the SD card which may lead to overwriting and permanent data loss.

Hdata Recovery is a fully featured software and should be the ultimate solution to recovering data from formatted Hard Disk Drives, emptied Recycle Bin and accidental deletes.