Corrupted RAW files (pink strips, ...) from SD Card error

[AeroPorc]

Hello,

 

I just recently went on a trip to Thailand with my Sony Alpha A5000, and immediately tried to extract the pictures I've taken during my entire trip. But I had the unpleasant surprise to see my SD card being unreadable, both by the computer and by the camera.

I instantly tried to use several recovering tools, both to recover the pictures and to repair the SD card. At first the SD card was not correctly detected by the OS (impossible to perform chkdsk or to use most of the tools, partition not correctly detected), so I first used PhotoRec and TestDisk to first recover as much files as possible and then try to fix the SD Card issue. As it was not possible to fix the problem with TestDisk, I performed a Quick Format of the SD Card (Quick in order to not rewrite anything on the memory). My SD card was then correctly detected and displayed on the OS, and I then tried several different recovery tools (Recuva, MiniTool Power Data Recovery and PhotoRec again) to get the pictures back.

I could recover the files from the trip but most of the lossless pictures (which are ARW when extracted by Recuva and MiniTool, but SR2 when extracted by PhotoRec, no idea why) are corrupted. They seem ok in appearance (the thumbnail in Windows Explorer seem perfectly normal), but when I try to open them I most of the time see some weird pink strip or cuts both in the default Windows Pictures and in Lightroom - some of them are thus only minor corruption (like change of exposure or rotated picture).

I posted attached some example to give you a hint about the issue. Also, old files (pictures from older trips) are them recovered perfectly well.

 

Would some of you have ever experienced such issues? Would you have any idea about how to recover the pictures (like other tools to give a shot, methods to correct the corruption, ...)? I didn't find much about those distortion.

Any help or recommendation will be truly appreciated! Best regards,

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[Olaf W.]

Sounds like a broken SD card. Too bad, but this can happen, unfortunately. 

17 minutes ago, AeroPorc said:

the thumbnail in Windows Explorer seem perfectly normal

The preview picture is just an embedded low resolution jpeg. Your raw example definitely looks corrupted. 

[XKAES]

Does your camera correctly create pictures now?  If so, it's just an SD card gone bad.  That happens -- and there are many reasons.  Some people try to get their pictures off of an SD card ASAP.  That's about the only way to avoid this problem.