need file copy/recovery software with a timeout

[Big Jim]

have a MicroSD Card here that was registered corrupted in the phone it was used in. The phone couldn't read it at all.
plugged in to a windows machine it throws up a warning about needing to fix the drive (which I have done) upon completion it immediately asked me to repair it again.

I can browse the drive and copy files, but there are a fair number of files that cause any software I have used to freeze up, and the only way to get them moving again is to pull the drive and reinsert.

I have tried roadkills unstoppable copier but when I click skip on a "frozen" file it does nothing.
Again I have to pull the drive to get any response.

Is there a program that will allow you to set a timeout per file ?


just to add another weird behaviour with this drive, every file I delete re-appears when the drive is pulled reinserted into the machine???

 

[GreyWolf]

First I wouldn't delete or force any writes on that memory card as for ripping it I would boot under a linux platform in case you have some odd filenames and I would use ddrescue.

Edit: Under windows dos admin mode you could try to use

xcopy /C/H/R/S/Y c:\ d:\
(C: is source and D: is destination drive)

xcopy /? (for parameters)

 

[pcpete]

Try making a clone of the drive using ddrescue, then use your favorite recovery program on the clone . I like rstudio. You may find after the clone is made you can just copy normally from it

 

[LedHed]

Everything pcpete just said

 

[Markverhyden]

What @pcpete said. You should have started out with an image of the card. Having operated on the card directly you may have inadvertently destroyed data.

 

[fencepost]

Do not write anything to the drive. If you're using Windows, you likely can't prevent it from trying to do so, so Don't Use Windows for anything recovery related. Windows will screw your card and the chances of recovery.

If it's actually important send it out, for example to Luke but I'm sure there are some excellent recovery companies in the UK as well.

If you're going to be working with it yourself, boot up a box with PartedMagic (or other Linux recovery distro) and either A) ddrescue it to an image file on a regular drive after reading guides on how to use ddrescue or B) use PhotoRec to try to pull all recognized files off of it. The first option is highly recommended over the second.

If you image the card you can always use PhotoRec on the image to see what it can recover, and you can use a ddrescue logfile to attempt to read other parts of the card if some fail. If you hose the card by reading it with PhotoRec (or god forbid letting Windows mess with it), you're done and probably so is anyone else.

I'll note that on SSDs at least writing to the drive (e.g. by deleting a file which causes a rewrite of the directory without removing the original data) you're writing over new areas of the drive. This is called "wear-leveling." I'm not sure what SD cards do along these lines, but likely something similar. Since writes are appearing to fail, likely when you "delete" it's attempting to write that directory info to a new location on the card, stomping anything that was in that location, then failing to update to point to that new location. Every write costs you potentially salvageable data

 

[Big Jim]

DD Rescue has pretty much done what windows did.
Got to a corrupt file and stopped.
Been sat on the same file now for about 15 - 20 minutes nothing is moving.
There are a lot of these files that are corrupted so if it is going to hang this long on each one this recovery will take an eternity.

 

[fencepost]

DD Rescue has pretty much done what windows did.
Got to a corrupt file and stopped.

Did you read any of the guides for it first? Notably, do you have it using a log file? If so, restart it with the same log file plus the command line options "-n -N -r 0 -T 1" which should get you a quick and dirty copy of everything it can read without retrying failed reads and with a timeout of 1s for how long a read can take.

If you didn't specify at least some of those it hit the first bad spot and will not continue until it reads that spot.

If you don't have a log file restart anyway with those options plus a log file.

 

[Big Jim]

I followed the Technibble guide don't worry.

Its at about 72Gb right now so it did get moving in the end.
errsize = 49000kb
errors 750

 

[Moltuae]

just to add another weird behaviour with this drive, every file I delete re-appears when the drive is pulled reinserted into the machine???

The behaviour you describe sounds a lot like that of the fake SD cards I've previously seen, although it's been a long time since I last encountered one. Fake SD cards are cards that have been hacked to make them appear to have a greater capacity than they actually have. As I understand it, the hack causes the same area of memory to be mapped multiple times. The result is that the memory card behaves normally until the real capacity is exceeded, at which point any further data that is added begins to overwrite and corrupt the existing data. IIRC, deleted files that keep 're-appearing' is a common symptom, due to file system corruption.

If the SD card is fake, the chances of recovering all of the data will be pretty slim, since much of it has probably already been overwritten. You may be able make the card usable again however, by returning it to the correct capacity:
https://www.gadgetvictims.com/2012/07/quickn-dirty-way-to-fix-fake-sd-card.html

 

[Big Jim]

It has been a while since I bought the card, and I am no expert. but afaik it is a genuine Sandisk Ultra card. (128GB)

I'll run that fix on it anyway once this recover is complete just to see what happens.

 

[Markverhyden]

DD Rescue has pretty much done what windows did.
Got to a corrupt file and stopped.
Been sat on the same file now for about 15 - 20 minutes nothing is moving.
There are a lot of these files that are corrupted so if it is going to hang this long on each one this recovery will take an eternity.

Properly setup DD-Rescue doesn't hang on a corrupted file. In fact it doesn't even see a file. All it sees are blocks. So it copies the good, the bad, and the ugly in terms of files. But a bad block will cause it to hang. Try using clonezilla. I find the expert mode, which includes skipping bad blocks, to be easier to use than some other imaging tools. You can also download and install R-Studio and use it in trial mode. You have all the features but can only recover files below a certain size, 64k if I remember correctly. If you like it you can buy the license, register it, and continue on without having to rescan.

 

[Joep]

I've had some luck with this before: https://www.klennet.com/imager/tutorial.aspx

 

[lcoughey]

Its not uncommon for the nand to fail, thus the bad blocks. Unfortunately, the "repair" that was run likely caused irreversible file system damage as it probably dropped FAT chains connected to bad sectors.

It is always best practice to get a clone of any drive with issues before ever doing anything that might write to it. After getting a clone, just recover the files with data recovery software against the clone, as already mentioned by others.

 

[Joep]

it throws up a warning about needing to fix the drive (which I have done) upon completion it immediately asked me to repair it again.

Can't believe I missed that - that was a HUGE MISTAKE.