SD Card 'electronically locked'

I've just returned from a 3 week, 8 country, 5400 mile road trip to Nordkapp in the Arctic Circle.

Last night I spent 5 hours transferring the files onto my hard disc only to find that one card had failed.
It gave the message "This card is electronically locked" whilst I was using it, in the K5iis, and now isn't recognised in the macbook and only shows as an empty drive in a windows PC.

It covers photos and video from 2 days of our trip, including a visit to Copenhagen, and is probably half full (8Gb).

Can anyone recommend a data recovery company or some software (windows or mac)that might work? I have tried photorec but it just records error reading sector message.

Have you tried Rescue Pro?

http://www.lc-tech.com/pc/sandisk-rescuepro-and-rescuepro-deluxe/ has a trial version which will say whether or not it can see any images.

My copy was provided FOC by SanDisk several years ago and works well.


Alternatively, can you see any images on the camera?

I've not had the misfortune to need it, but a rather comprehensive and well respected tool for this is Zero Assumption Recovery available from http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

You won't need it's features for recovering RAID and stuff so the freely downloadable demo version is all you need. It's photo image recovery software function is treated as freeware as opposed to its heavy dury recovey stuff at cost.

Ralph - try Iolo Search & Recover link. If you decide you want to use this, I can PM you with the licence key, provided you delete the program (or licence the software in your own name if you find it useful). If you give this program a go, use SMARTSCAN and STRONGSCAN simultaneously. That way, every single bit and byte on the card gets analysed. It takes a while to run (because it can be so thorough), so probably something you'd want to run overnight.

As an afterthought - have you tried rocking the lock switch a few times? It may well be that a wee bit of fluff has worked its way into that part of the card, and although it "feels" as though the card is unlocked, it may actually be misinforming you.

The switch is only a "write protect" - to allow or prevent writing to the card. It does nothing if all you want to do is read. And it is the reader which detects teh switch position not the card _ I lost the slider on a card recently and just by using insulating tape I was able to then write and erase the card.

Thanks for all the suggestions I shall try some of them before I send the disc off. One company has quoted me £79 - £179 with a 95% chance of recovery and no data no fee.

So as long as none of these programs affect the card I'll give them a try first.

I shall let you know how I get on.

Ralph - none of these cards will do anything to what's on the cards other than attempt to "read" the data, then an algorithm-thingy reconstructs what it finds to another storage place (usually on your desktop/laptop, away from the card).

Just to check, can you see any images on it when it's in the camera? And have you tried connecting the camera directly to the computer to read?

Another thought:

I have a couple of pen drives and an SD card which have a secure area - it runs proprietary software and gives general access to the drive along side an password protected and hidden area. Just wondering of the card is one of that type and something inadvertently pushed the data to the hidden area.

Probably unlikely - but thought I would ask.

I would definitely check the contacts on the SD cards - perhaps cleaning with isopropyl alcohol.

It is possible that the "Secure" part of the SD card has been invoked (perhaps by accident or a card-write error). The SD card has a 16byte password that will prevent all reads & writes to the flash area. Apparently the password is purely a controller thing, and by disassembling it's possible to bypass the controller and read out the data anyway.

The same 'bypass' method can be used when it's the controller that's died.

When using software for attempted recovery I would always engage the write protect switch on the card itself. I've had two or three SanDisk cards fracture and this switch gets stuck (or falls apart). Now switched over to the Samsung Extreme cards which are built like a tank in comparison to SanDisk

Matt

Before doing anything make a backup image of the SD Card to
your HDD using a free tool such as Win32 Disk Imager

http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

If it copies OK you should be able to write the image to
another card and try to recover that to avoid damage to
the original and bypass any faulty contacts.

'

Thanks for all your suggestions but I'm afraid none of them worked. Some software would recognise that a card existed but wouldn't do anything others couldn't even 'see' it.

As such I have sent it off to East Anglian Data Recovery who have informed me that the controller chip, in the card, is fried. They will now dismantle it, extract the data from the storage chip and then attempt to re-encode it.

They have had it 2 days so far so I will let you know how it goes.

However there is some good news to report; the last night of our trip was spent at Ypres, in Belgium. We, of course, attended the very moving ceremony at the Menen Gate. Because I wanted to capture the scene without spoiling the mood and having to think about the camera, I decided to video it and just hold the camera still. Not wishing to have to swap cards halfway through, I put a fresh card in the camera and stored the old one in the battery grip.

It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't retrieved this card. When I did I discovered many of the images that I thought I had lost. Needless to say I am pretty chuffed. The interesting thing is that I, now, am not sure what is on the card that is being dismantled

Still, time will tell and at least I'm not so anxious

Unless you delete "on-the-fly" you should be able to use the image numbers and folder IDs to determine how many are missing.

Hey,
Don’t worry my friend, you can easily retrieve your picture and video from locked SD card. There are many professional recovery tool which deals with such type of situations. I have used software named remo recover tool, to get back my data from locked memory card. I got it from web. Give a try.
Thnks