Huh, I thought I remembered there having been a conversation in response to that. Well, never mind.
Anyway, yesterday I was struck by some cybermonday sales offering SD card at better than half price. I was sore tempted, on account of the discount - "but it's such a good investment!", I grumbled to myself. "I'll probably need one of those one day!". But no: "nonsense!" quoth I. "I've got plenty of space on the card I've already got - it's not like the old 500mb on a card days when you needed more than one of them, this one will do for years, if not forever!"
And today, my SD card doesn't work. It isn't recognised by my computer. Or by any other computer, so far as I can see. (or by my phone; but, to be fair, I think it's bigger than my phone is able to recognise anyway, so that might be a phone problem rather than a card problem). [more details of failure:
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I've tried a few things to fix it. But all the fixes for "my computer doesn't recognise my card" seem to rely on my computer being able to recognise my card...
- I can't run checkdisk from file explorer because it doesn't know it's there
- I can't run chkdsk from the command line because it say the volume cannot be opened (because it doesn't know it's there)
- I can't change its assigned drive letter in Disk Management, because it doesn't know it's there
- I can't run a file recovery program, because the free ones I've tried all ask me to select the thing I want to scan for files, and it's not there (some of them explicitly say it needs to have an assigned drive letter)
I have tried disabling/enabling and uninstalling/installing the hardware card reader, to no effect. [well, maybe some? after the initial problem and before I reinstalled, it seemed a bit dodgy on whether it would recognise other cards after the problem card was in there (eg having to disable/enable the reader and then remove and reinsert the new card). But doing this has made all the other cards work fine, yet has had no effect on the bad one)]
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So, some questions:
- is there any hope of getting data off the card, and/or being able to format and reuse the card? if so, how?
- more specifically, I've heard rumours that reading the card through a USB adaptor can sometimes read unreadable cards. Any truth to that? (speaking of things I bought once on the basis that it might be helpful one day... and that I have absolutely zero chance of discovering the current location of)
- am I stupid to try to store things on SD cards in the first place? I like them because they're convenient, and because they seemed more reliable than external harddrives, with all their moving parts (I had an HD fail on me once, but to be fair it was long ago and probably less advanced tech than today). I've always assumed that even if some files get damaged now and then due to a bad sector, the rest could be salvaged, more easily than on an HD (where there are actual physical things that can go wrong). But if they're so fragile, and completely wipe their complete contents every now and then for no apparent reason, then maybe I need to find another external HD?
[I've only had two memory drives fail before (other than the odd damaged file). One was an old memory stick that I stupidly stuck into an unfamiliar port, which turned out to be a stick-wiping port (a friend's old computer - I think there was some short circuit problem that basically fried anything you connected to that port?); the other was a Kingston SD card from Amazon that just never worked (and for all I know is just a scam piece of plastic with some gold leaf painted onto it). But this one was a reputable SanDisk card, worked fine before, not knowing done anything to it, suddenly and completely kaput. It's disconcerting.]
Anyway, sorry for the rambling old-man-technology-question...