‘Card error’, ‘needs formatting’, files turned to gibberish, folders showing empty — corruption wears many faces, and the right move depends on which one you’re looking at. This is the triage we run, written down — including the order of operations that protects the photos while you fix the card.
Nearly everything that repairs a corrupted card works by rewriting its structures — the same structures your photos hide behind. Recover first. Repair after. Never the other way round.
Four presentations cover almost every corrupted card we see.
‘You need to format this card.’ The friendliest-looking and most dangerous prompt. The card’s file system has stopped making sense to the device, and the device is offering to blank it. Decline, connect the card to a computer through a reader, and carve the photos off with PhotoRec — corruption breaks the index, and carving never needed the index in the first place.
Shows as RAW, 0 bytes, or a wrong size. Same disease, different rash: the structures describing the card are damaged while the photo data behind them usually survives. Carve first; format later. If Windows nags you to ‘scan and fix’, decline that too — repair tools write.
Files present but broken — photos that open half-grey, videos that stop mid-play, filenames in symbols. This is corruption caught mid-act, often from a card pulled during a write or a counterfeit card running out of real capacity. Copy off everything that opens, carve for the rest, and retire the card.
Not detected at all — nothing in the camera, nothing in the reader, no sound from Windows. That’s not corruption; it’s failure of the card’s controller or physical damage, and no software can address hardware. Monolith cards like these are read at chip level on the bench — the core of our memory card recovery work.
With the files recovered and verified on your computer — open a sample, don’t take the file count’s word for it — the actual repair is anticlimactic: a full format in the camera it will live in, which rebuilds every structure fresh. If a formatted card corrupts again within weeks, stop giving it chances; flash memory fails progressively, and the second corruption is rarely the last. Two habits prevent most repeat visits: never pull a card while the device is writing, and treat cards as transport rather than archives — photos should live on the card for days, not months. Formatted it already and then remembered what was on it? Different problem, same physics — our formatted media recovery service handles exactly that, provided the card hasn’t been refilled since.
The cruellest timing is mid-shoot: the camera flashes a card error with the event still happening around you. The field protocol, in order: don’t format from the camera menu, however helpfully it offers; swap to a spare card and keep shooting — the rescue can wait, the ceremony can’t; power the camera off before removing the suspect card, then write-lock it (the little side switch on full-size SD) and pocket it separately from the working spares. Everything on it is now frozen exactly as the error left it — the ideal starting state for the carving rescue on this page, or for the bench if the card has gone properly silent. And afterwards, one habit upgrade: cards fail mid-shoot far more often at the end of long service lives, so professionals cycle cards out of front-line duty long before they die of old age.
Order is everything: recover first, repair second. Most ‘fixes’ — formatting, error-checking tools, letting the camera reinitialise the card — work by rewriting the card’s structures, which is exactly where your photos’ last traces live. Image or carve the photos off first with a tool like PhotoRec; once they’re safe, format the card freely and it will usually work again.
Because the card’s table of contents no longer makes sense to it — usually after a card was pulled mid-write, used across two devices, or has a controller starting to fail. The format prompt is the device offering to write a blank new index. The photos behind the unreadable index are typically still there, which is precisely why you should decline.
Recover the contents, then bin it — that’s our honest advice in most cases. Corruption that arrives out of nowhere is often the first symptom of failing flash memory or a tired controller, and a card that’s lied to you once doesn’t deserve your wedding shoot. Cards are cheap; the photos on them aren’t.
If it’s new, from a marketplace bargain, and corrupted once you’d filled it past a certain point — very possibly. Counterfeits carry small flash reprogrammed to claim big capacities; everything written past the true size silently destroys earlier files. Free capacity-testing tools verify a card’s honest size in an hour. Genuine cards from reputable sellers make corruption an event; fakes make it a schedule.
Free diagnostic at our Belfast lab — we’ll read the card’s symptoms, tell you honestly whether DIY carving is safe, and quote in writing before any work.