My phone (Captivate) ran out of battery. When I recharged it, it cheerfully told me that my external sd card was damaged and offered to reformat it for me.

Um, no.

On my Linux system, fsck.vfat merely told me “FAT32 root dir starts with a bad cluster!” which wasn’t much help to getting my files back.

Fortunately, TestDisk has no trouble finding the root directory and copying off many of my files. I did have to make a bit of room since it’s a 32GB card that’s almost full, and I copied an image of the card to work from in case I messed up. Some of the files are zero-length, but most of my pictures are safe.

This is encouraging me to re-think my decision not to auto-upload my pictures to google. Hmm.

TestDisk - CGSecurity

Ed Burnette November 09, 2011 22:40

Auto upload is nice, I highly recommend it.

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable