# Can data be recovered from a Formatted SD Flash Card?



## Bjorn_Of_Iceland (Dec 22, 2010)

Formatted, not just deleted.. not sure if its the same..


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## kenkickr (Dec 22, 2010)

I've used Recuva from piriform, makers of CCleaner, to recover data from damaged partition tables or formated drives.  

At work we use Restorer2000 and have had good luck as well recovering data after a customer ran Recovery on their system not knowing what they were doing.


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## 95Viper (Dec 22, 2010)

From the maker of testdisk, try PhotoRec.
Download here.
It is open source and free to use.


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## Bjorn_Of_Iceland (Dec 22, 2010)

Ok. Wasnt aiming for recovery though. Say that the card is in the hands of another person, that person can just use these utilities and recover files?


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## Widjaja (Dec 22, 2010)

Most success I have had is with recover my files but it is very expensive.


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## kenkickr (Dec 22, 2010)

Bjorn_Of_Iceland said:


> Ok. Wasnt aiming for recovery though. Say that the card is in the hands of another person, that person can just use these utilities and recover files?



Yes.  They would just have to plug the card into a system that has a card reader and let the utility read/scan it for file or partition information.


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## 95Viper (Dec 22, 2010)

You wish to make it un-recoverable?

Use CCleaner's Drive Wipe options in the Tools menu.
Pick the device and how many passes.


Edit:

Other info and software:
DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke)
Eraser(Also, called Hiedi's Eraser)

Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory
by Peter Gutmann
Department of Computer Science
University of Auckland


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## Bjorn_Of_Iceland (Dec 22, 2010)

Widjaja said:


> Most success I have had is with recover my files but it is very expensive.



what do you mean?


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## Bjorn_Of_Iceland (Dec 22, 2010)

kenkickr said:


> Yes.  They would just have to plug the card into a system that has a card reader and let the utility read/scan it for file or partition information.


ok so it needs not to be on the machine where it was formatted? wth. this things are effed up. :shadedshu crap. Ive company sensitive docs stored there


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## kenkickr (Dec 22, 2010)

I thought your last ? was on how to get the data.  Forget what I posted there since I see, now that I can read, you do not want the data grabbed by somebody else.  

The tools Viper posted will definitely make sure any data is irretrievable.  I'm a DBaN fan so if you use it all you have to do is type: *autonuke* and it will run 3 passes on what you want formated if running the dos tool.


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## Widjaja (Dec 22, 2010)

Bjorn_Of_Iceland said:


> what do you mean?



Your thread appeared as if you were wanting to recover files off a SD card.
The application I was talking about can recover files from a formatted hard drive.


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## Bjorn_Of_Iceland (Dec 22, 2010)

kenkickr said:


> I thought your last ? was on how to get the data.  Forget what I posted there since I see, now that I can read, you do not want the data grabbed by somebody else.
> 
> The tools Viper posted will definitely make sure any data is irretrievable.  I'm a DBaN fan so if you use it all you have to do is type: *autonuke* and it will run 3 passes on what you want formated if running the dos tool.



yeah.. in anycase, the cards gone now . So I cant do those things.. dang. Shouldve thought of it earlier


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## 95Viper (Dec 23, 2010)

Here (Leave No Trace: How to Completely Erase Your Hard Drives, SSDs and Thumb Drives) is a very decent, but simple explanation at Gizmodo.

And, some more info from the Wipe Your Data website:

Quoted question & answer from that page.

"How many times should I overwrite data on a memory stick to make it irrecoverable?"

"ONE single pass of zeroes or random data is enough to erase data beyond recovery on a flash memory stick, SD/MMC card or solid state disk.

Overwriting data on a flash drive more than once only wastes time and write cycles, the only thing you need to make sure of is that the whole of the memory thumb drive or solid state disk is completely overwritten, in other words, you can not safely erase a single file from a memory stick but you can safely erase the whole device and by doing this you will be making sure that all blocks are overwritten and not shifted to other logical addresses in the flash memory."


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## Bo$$ (Jan 8, 2011)

BobMaria said:


> To recover data from memory card you need rely on professional photo recovery tool like Kernel for FAT and NTFS and follow the steps:
> 1. Install the software on ur computer.
> 2. Connect the memory card to computer.
> 3. select the drive(usually G or H for memory card) , click Start. Now the scanning process will start to search the deleted files. After a while you will then get a list of recoverable files.
> 4. Press Recover to perform full recovery.



read, he has lost his flash card with sensitive info on it


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## Akumos (Jan 14, 2011)

Just for reference... when you delete data or format a drive... windows only deletes the reference to the file. The file is still there until it's written over by different data!!


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