Forum Discussion
How to recover data from a corrupted SD card on Windows 10?
Really hoping someone can help me out here. I was using my SanDisk SD card (256GB) to store videos and photos from a recent family event. It was working perfectly fine yesterday. However, when I tried to open it today, I got an error saying the card is not accessible and needs to be formatted.
I tried plugging it into a different computer and even a camera, but nothing seems to be able to read it anymore. Is there any way to recover data from a corrupted SD card like this? I’d love to hear if anyone has had success with any free (or paid) tools that work for this kind of issue.
Just to add, I’m still using Windows 10 Home and haven’t upgraded to Windows 11, in case that makes any difference.
2 Replies
Give Windows File Recovery a shot. It’s a free tool developed by Microsoft and works well for recovering lost files from USB drives.
Even though it says the card needs to be formatted, don’t do it unless you’re ready to give up on recovering any files. Formatting wipes everything, and that’s probably not what you want right now. Try fix it in Disk Managment.
Open Disk Management, look for your SD card in the list. If it shows up there but without a drive letter, you can try assigning one manually. That might let you access it again.
If Windows sees the card but says it's empty or inaccessible, open Command Prompt as Administrator and run: chkdsk X: /f /r, replace X: with the actual drive letter of your SD card. This command checks for file system errors and tries to fix them. It won’t recover deleted or missing files, but it can repair corruption that’s preventing access.
It is very likely that your data is not lost, but there is something wrong with the SD card and your files cannot be read normally.
