Michael Edwards wrote:
Any tips or ideas for recovering data from a physically damaged SD flash card? One of the cards I'm working with has hairline cracks in it, that appear to be getting worse with handling. I was able to recover some data off it at first, but now, no go.
The following is based on personal experience with components much larger than SD cards, so take it with many grains of salt.
If the cracks are in the PCB, then you could purchase an identical SD card, very carefully desolder both surface-mount chips (I admit this is nearly impossible even for experts but I have seen it done), and swap the one whose data you want onto the good board. Since the difficulty in removing surface-mount chips lies in doing so without damaging the board, you could just remove the chip from the bad board. Once you have that chip, you could implement a breadboard that fulfills the functionality of the PCB. With all of the latest hardware compilers and such, that isn't as hard as it sounds, and you could use the duplicate (still need that) to reverse-engineer the functionality. If the actual flash memory chip is a standard one, you could just implement a breadboard that allows access to it via some easier mode than the SD standard.
All of this would require resources far greater than one would be willing to expend for vacation pictures, however. I don't know, off-hand, of any standard kits that might help, although the flash chip manufacturer may offer development kits that could be adapted.
Ray Parks
