Your Best Advice for rescuing a corrupted SD card recorded with Tascam DR40?

puredrifting

puredrifting

Major Contributor
Hi all:

I am on a shoot, we are using DSLRs and a Tascam DR40 digital audio recorder. Using a Kensington 16GB SD card and Tascam DR40. Have used this combo before with no issues. Shot all day yesterday, interviews, presentations. Went to shoot again this morning and when I booted up the Tascam this morning to shoot an interview, it greeted me with a "cannot read SD card, do you want to format?" All of our interviews and a one hour presentation audio was recorded on this SD card.

The way the Tascam formats SD cards, they don't seem to be readable by my Mac's SD card slot but have always read fine when using the Tascam as a card reader. Does anyone here have any experience with corrupt header files on SD cards? There are quite a few different data recovery programs available for Mac, and I know I can take it to a data recovery service that will cost a lot of money. This audio is very important to our project but I can't pay thousands of dollars to recover the audio. I don't know if any of the software recovery programs are worthwhile, I have used various utilities to recover files from a corrupted hard drive, but I have never tried this with an SD card. I have popped the "save" tab on the SD card but I can't clone it for safety so I only get one shot at repairing/recovering the audio files.

If you have successfully recovered audio/video files from an SD card, any advice on what to do from here is appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan
 
I haven't formatted a card on the DR40, but I have used a card in it that my Mac can read without trouble. In any case, you may be able to copy the card as a disk image and then try to do the recovery on that.

Try putting the card in the Mac, and running Disk Utility (which is in Applications/Utilities). Under the File menu, select New->Disk Image from <device>. (On my Mac at the moment that is grayed out because I have no disk devices attached. With luck it won't be grayed out on yours.)
 
i have successfully recovered files from SD cards with Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Enable the deep scan option when scanning the card to have better chances of finding the files you are looking for.

I have been able to go back and recover pictures deleted months before, don't know how well it would work in your case, good luck!
 
Thanks for all of the recommendations, I appreciate them. Even though the SD card wouldn't read on the Tascam, when I inserted the SD card into my Macbook Pro, the card read on the laptop. I was able to just open the card and access the files so I copied them to our editing drives. After ejecting the SD card from Mac, when I put it back into the Tascam DR40, it still won't read the card, it just asks if I want to reformat the card. Weird, but thank goodness the files were still there.

Now I have to figure out if the SD is defective, should I toss it out, or should I just reformat it and try to use it again? SD cards are cheap, perhaps I should just chuck it into the bin and start with a newer SD card? Wondering if the Tascam header format just became corrupt or if the card is defective? Opinions?

Thanks.
 
I would think that a defective card would mean that it wouldn't read anywhere. Seems like there's something in the headers that only the DR-40 needs, and a reformat may fix the issue (of course, I'd do some test recordings on the reformatted card before taking it in the field).

That said, I've had issues with Kensington cards before and have come to trust Sandisk quite a bit. Prices dropped dramatically over the last year, and other than budget restrictions I'd say there's no reason not to go ahead get a couple new cards.

By the way, Dan, good to see you back! Where have you been hiding?
 
Thanks for the advice Alex. I took a position in management consulting for a European firm, I found it was becoming too difficult to make a living in production. Daughter just left for college, bills pile up, you know the drill. Client hired me knowing my background and for the past two years, have done very little production. But client is now deciding that they need to join the new century and get with the program with media so it looks as if I am evolving back into production, have been producing a lot of projects over the past few months and it looks to be growing. I have kind of been going nuts with DSLRs, all of my delivery is for the web and or computer simulations, nice to be free of broadcast requirements and needing shoot on Reds and Alexas, but as you know, shooting with DSLRs is challenging as well. But they work well. I shot a doc a few years ago on my 5D MKII and was learning with it, now I am shooting a lot with it. My HPX170 is gathering dust, still use it for longer form stuff but have been shooting a ton of web promos, short form so DSLRs give me more flexibility with travel, setting up two or three of them in a location, etc.

We'll have to catch up off-line, it's been years since we spoke.

Dan
 
Dan,

Just recently 3 of my drivers totaling 5TB of data went down due to the file-system/index being corrupted, however, the data were all intact on the drive. Used both Recuva (Windows-only) and Data Rescue (Windows+Mac) to get them all off. Whatever you decide to do, do not write anything to your card at this moment. Same thing happened with my 32GB CF card when recording, just make sure to not overwrite it with new data.

A.
 
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