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A friend bought a SD card to take photos on their travels. The SD card was not formatted and the camera just started writing on it I guess. I am now tasked to retrieve those photos to a secondary drive.

  1. With "lsblk" both the SD card and the USB drive are recognized as /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1
  2. I found out about a tool called ddrescue and used it to (I guess) copy all the data from the unpartitioned SD card to the Thumbdrive. This did not work as after the 2 hour long process the thumbdrive as unpartitioned as well and was not pssoble to mount.... No idea what went wrong.
  3. I found another tool called "testdisk" which allowed me to look into the SD card and see that there infact was a DCIM folder with a couple subfolders with pictures inside. I went ahead and used the "testdisk" copy function to copy each folder to the thumbdrive which I newly formatted and partitioned. During the process I was able to look at all the photos being copied as they appeared on the filesystem explorer on the thumbdrive. After I finished I safely ejected the thumbdrive and plugged it in again to make sure everything was fine for my friend. But it wasn't I now got the error message that an unknown error happened while mounting the drive. I then tried to manually mount to no success. FSCK did nothing and when booting into windows it even tried to repair but also said there is no readable partition on the drive....

Please help me help my friend the would be really sad for their whole journey's documentation to be gone....

If I need to add any information please tell me

Thanks a lot for any hints Jakob :)

SoftwareCreator
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1 Answers1

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almost certainly your friend's camera will come with a USB cable that connects between the camera and a computer for copying off the images that have been taken. assuming the camera was made this century!

plug that cable into the camera, and plug the other end into a WINDOWS computer. with the WINDOWS computer, copy the photos off the camera. you really do NOT want to be messing around with 'recovery' programs when the data is as important as irreplaceable holiday images.

once the images are safe, you can then make copies onto a thumb drive. bear in mind that thumb drives are notoriously unreliable as long-term storage, you need to have backups of your images elsewhere.

btw - what make/model is the camera?