[Epic 4G Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] ghadkali:
hi

first of all i rarely quit on something, and i ( try to ) keep my hopes up even tho the odds are not exactly in my favor....strangely it worked for me on numerous occasions in the past, so im crossing my fingers one more time With this delicate matter.

My micro sd card 32 gb class 10 was bought just a little over 4 month ago ( ebay ) i downloaded the program from Google that verifies the Cards capacity, just to make sure i didnt buy a 2gb clone. After verification i mounted it in my Galaxy s3 and started its normal usage.

Im a father of 4 children, and if you have come to fatherhood/motherhood its really an age of Wonders.....if you can manage to put asside the the every day stress, constant yelling ,telling, shouting, nagging, and hair pulling you know its truly a wonderfull life ;)

I know just like everybody else, that time goes by fast....and beeing a hobby photographer i lover to capture special moments in Our lifes, becouse face it....10 years Down the road really somethimes feel just like 2.

I have filled the card to almost 20gb of Pictures and videos of my preacious Family

the past 4 weeks my phone started to Mount / unmount the card, whenever i turned the screen on i'd see the Notification at the top left, " card was unexpectadly removed " and Mounts it back and everything was normal. 2 weeks ago it started to say " card not recognised " but after a couple of minutes, or the Next time i used the phone the card was mounted and working fine.....by then i started getting a Clue, ok i really should take a backup really soon.

2 days ago 10/06 on my birthday mind you

the card finally gave up and my phone gave me a warning that the card needed formatting. Wich i didnt do!

After the incident i googled away for solutions, everything from quick formats, datarecovery Applications, unlocking the Write protect on micro sd's and chkdsk within command prompt.

I found this thread here : http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1355528

Talking about how he manage to recover his data ( happy for you )

Unfrortunately it didnt work for me, checkdisk couldnt perform becouse of the microsd's format beeing RAW

i tried 3 different Applications for data recovery one of them beeing zardata recovery software to no avail

i gave this one a shot : TestDisk i didnt play arround too much becouse i wanted to make minimal to no changes to the card in hopes of recovering most of the data, so i didnt really get far With this one.

i downloaded fat32 format wich stated that i might get the card to be readable again, but it didnt work becouse i got "the card is Write protected" error ( even tho there was no Lock that was on )

At this time the card is not readable by my Galaxy s3, only way is to plug it into a card reader With SH support thru usb on my Laptop and even then i get a Message telling me it needs formatting, wich i tried a couple of times after googling the correct unit allocation sizes wich i set to about 4k to get the best performance and to try to keep its standard 4k wich i presumed it was when i formatted it first time to fat32

I am aware that on some forums they mention that if the card is about to give up it goes into Write protect mode, but since i havent written anything on it since this started, i think i still have a chance.

About 10 years ago, i had my hdd crash on me....a friend of mine helped me recover my data using Linux to read the raw data......anything out there that does the same job ?

I also appreciate a step by step guide for the TestDisk program from http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

The Cards size is approx 30mb at the moment, there are no visible marks, scratches or cracks on it.

Please before you answer me, think of any.....really ANY solution that might help me get my data back, i dont want to give up on this yet.

I thought if anything else fails ill send it off to some data recovery center and get the data that way.

Thank you for beeing patient and Reading thru this, have a Nice day