SD card error after battery died while recording - cannot access footage Sony A7s ii

T

tvbad

Member
I was in the middle of a long video recording when the battery died and the camera powered off. (It was an off market, but highly rated non Sony battery that was showing 12% left).
I put in a new battery and turned on the camera and I got a message on the camera that the SD card index was missing, would I like to fix that? (not sure if that was the exact wording, but it was an offer to repair, not format.) I chose yes. The camera worked for a few seconds and then the message came back that the repair did not work and offered to reformat. I powered off the camera, took out the card and put it in my computer, but it was not recognizable on my Mac and it offered to eject or reformat.

I've run "Disk Drill" which recovered all the old files on the card, and other files which *may* be from the shoot. There's a 20GB "JPG" file. I tried renaming it to .MOV or .MP4 but it still will not open. I tried opening it in VLC and Wondershare Video Converter. No luck.

I've run Wondershare Data recover but it hasn't found anything either.

What's the best data recovery software for this sort of issue? I suspect there's about 20 crucial movie files on the card. Is this a common problem for Sony to ruin the card if turned off suddenly?

Thanks!
 
Did you ever find a solution? I ran into the same problem with an off market battery turning off at 30% and corrupting a file, I did the recovery option offered by the camera but the file shows as 0kb.

Edit: In my research since it appears to be less of a problem with sony brand batteries...
 
Cameras are programmed to work best with batteries made by their own company, so those batteries will always provide the most accurate readings (some higher-end third party batteries work well too).

Other lower-end third party batteries may not communicate efficiently with cameras, and even though the readings may indicate a certain percentage (30%), it may really be 1% and the camera could shut off at any time (as noted here).

As far as the corruption, sometimes it's very difficult to fix files that haven't "closed out" and completed writing, but it's not impossible.
 
Scim said:
Did you ever find a solution? I ran into the same problem with an off market battery turning off at 30% and corrupting a file, I did the recovery option offered by the camera but the file shows as 0kb.

Edit: In my research since it appears to be less of a problem with sony brand batteries...
Click to expand...

I ended up using a data recovery service. It cost me about $1700, but they we able to recover about 80% of the missing footage.
I tried all the software based DIY services I could find and buy online and none worked.
No more off brand batteries, except perhaps Watson, as B&H sells them so I'm guessing they are decent quality.
 
FWIW, we've all eaten up costs to save our reputation/the client(s)...hopefully it worked out in the end.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top