How to Repair Damaged Memory Card and Recover Data

Damaged memory card recovery overview

Popular memory cards include the SD card, CF card, xD-Picture card and Memory Stick. Those devices may get damaged due to various reasons such as a power shortage, an incorrect removal of the memory card, virus attack or some other unknown reasons. The accident usually comes with error messages like "memory card error", "card locked", "memory card not formatted error", or an error code on your camera screen and results in terrible data loss disaster. So, how to repair damaged memory card and recover your data becomes quite important if you happen to encounter such a problem.

Here on this page, we will show you how to repair and recover corrupted memory card in two parts.

Repair damaged memory card without data loss using CMD 

Once you have damaged your memory card, stop further operations on the memory card (e.g. taking new pictures, or deleting or formatting the memory card). And using CMD command line is the first way you can try to repair damaged memory card without formatting. Following is the detailed guide.

(This method is also available to fix damaged USB flash drive. For other similar demands, please refer to how to recover data from corrupted memory card not detected for a guide.)

1. Insert your memory card into a USB memory card reader and plug it into your computer. 

2. Go to the start menu, type in "cmd" in a search bar, hit enter and then you can see something named "cmd.exe" under a list of programs.

3. Right click "cmd.exe" and type in "chkdsk /X /f card letter:" or "chkdsk card letter: /f ", for example, "chkdsk /X /f G:" or "chkdsk h: /f" in the following command windows to start to repair damaged memory card without data loss.

After following the above steps, you might get a message, saying "Windows has made corrections to the file system" in the command window. That means the damaged memory card is successfully fixed.

And then you can go to check if you can access your data on the card. If not, you should try a third-party memory card data recovery software to get back your data and then act a format command to fix the damaged memory card.

How to recover data after repairing the damaged/corrupted memory card

EaseUS file recovery software is able to recover lost files in most data loss cases. You can try it to recover your photos, videos, music files, and documents if the damaged memory card can appear as a drive letter in "My Computer". Here is the tutorial.

Usually, deleted or formatted data is not permanently removed. Stop using the memory card once you lost data on it. With powerful memory card recovery software, you can hopefully get lost data back.

Step 1. Run memory card recovery software

• Connect the memory card on which you lost your files to your computer and launch EaseUS card recovery software - Data Recovery Wizard on your PC.
• Select your memory card under External Devices and click "Scan" to start finding your lost files.

Step 2. Scan to find all lost files from memory card

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard will fully scan your memory card and find all your lost data on it.

Step 3. Scan to find all lost files from your memory card.

After the scanning process, you can check and preview found files in this program.

• Underneath Deleted Files, you can find your deleted memory card files there.
• And if you formatted the memory card, you can check those files under Lost Partition Files.
• And Filter will help you quickly find your lost files from Graphics, Documents, Videos, Audio, and Email, etc.

You can directly double-click the files to preview and see if found files are all right. After this, you can choose those files and click "Recover" to restore them to a secure location on your PC or other external storage devices.