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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

Have an SD card that was copying file on to and in the middle of transfer the card went kaput and hasnt seen since. No machine I try it on even acknowledges it existence.

The card is almost a decade old at this point but is there a way to recover data ?

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Best to consult a data recovery specialist, will cost you an arm and a leg though.

10 years without power makes me think most of it wont be recoverable even if they can get to the data on it, but then again it depends on a lot of factors when it comes to flash memory.

Some amount of the data is almost certainly recoverable, but getting it done commercially is going to be $$$.

IIRC SD cards and most SSDs don't go through error check routine when powered, it has to be specified. Some do use the power-on time and run a routine if left on for too long.

You usually you have to read the entire drive to maintain, in my case S.M.A.R.T. reported changes to reserve blocks after doing that on an old drive.

I have a 16 year old 4GB SDcard with all data still intact.

10 years in use. On a phone.

Sometimes you can recover data over the SPI interface instead of the proprietary SD interface. Essentially, plug it into an arduino with one of the many SD card libraries and slowly dump the data over the serial link.

I'm unsure if this is just urban legend or not, though. I've never tried myself.

You can also tape over the pins to force 1-bit SDIO mode on most readers.

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