Bad SD card. Any hope?

[David W. Richardson]

I have a Dane-Elec 8GB SDHC class 4 card that has been used for awhile in a Canon HF R500 camcorder to videotape the Sunday morning service at our church. Actually, it's only the backup card -- we normally use a 16GB card, but keep this one around just in case. But I did use it a few weeks ago, and it worked fine then. I did find it in the camera one Sunday morning after that, and wondered who had been using it.

Anyway, I put the card in the camera today as I was doing some testing, and the camera kept saying I needed to initialize it. Every time I tried, initialization failed with 'an error' -- it never told me what error, or gave me any other info.

I brought the card home and stuck it into my PC, thinking maybe I could format it. Windows won't access or open it. It sits there thinking about it for awhile, then tells me to insert a card into the drive. Of course, there IS a card in the drive.

I've cleaned the contacts, but otherwise I don't know anything else to do.

Any ideas? Or just toss it?

 

[gkantziper]

Throw it away. It's worthless.

 

[Greg Smith]

Even if you got it working again, would you ever really be able to trust it in the future?

SD cards are cheap; throw it away and buy a larger capacity one from a well established brand (Sandisk, Lexar, Panasonic).

- Greg

 

[iamlance]

TestDisk did the trick for me when 2 of my SD cards had a similar issue. Was able to recover the files and view the SD card on the machine. It uses Dos to view the SD card, even when it won't show up on your screen.

However, like the others said, it's difficult to trust a card after it fails. I fixed my 2 cards, but you better believe I won't be using them for anything important in the future. I went and bought some new cards as replacements.