NDR / Hardware we take in / Camera and SD memory cards

Devices · cards from cameras

Nottingham SD and memory card recovery. No second copy exists, and the day does not come round again.

A card costs £250 + VAT, with a free look first, and in nearly every case the images will come off, even when the card appears dead; the exception is a card somebody has already reformatted. No other device fails as often, and none picks its moment as well: the fourth day of a fortnight away, or the exact moment you were backing everything up somewhere else. We get these cards from dealers photographing their stock for the Newark antiques fair, from a wedding photographer who shot a morning at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, from a showroom photo shoot for Long Point in Long Eaton, and from family holidays.

Only pay if we recover your data, on most jobs Free diagnosis first, then a single price, in writing Parcels come in from Derby, Lincoln and Loughborough

Ask an engineer and the first look is free
0115 8220606

Memory card symptoms, and how much time each leaves you.

Yours not here? Open the finder →

Each time the card goes in, it asks to be formattedThe index has gone, but the frames generally remain intact. Refuse the request to format.Routine work

Empty since a copy stopped half-wayA damaged file table, that is all. The frames are still where the camera put them.Routine work

No reader anywhere will see itIn most cases it is the controller. Sealed cards are accessed at chip level.Routine work

Images opening striped or corruptedWorn cells. Retire that card.Time-critical

Snapped, or badly buckledIt looks worse than it is: the die inside generally survives.Routine work

How to pack and post it: first ring us on 0115 8220606 for a quote, or use the form. Once you know the cost, box the drive so it cannot move in transit, and insure the parcel for the value of your files, not the disk. Please send it tracked to the intake lab in Manchester; we cover the cost of returning it to you. If you need help working out how to pack it, just ring us and one of our engineers will be happy to help. All the instructions are on the packing and postage guide.

The makes we see, and how each one fails.

SanDiskUltra, Extreme, Extreme Pro. Most camera bags carry one, and no range is counterfeited more.

Kingston and IntegralIntegral SD and microSD; Kingston Canvas React Plus and Canvas Select Plus.

ProGrade, Sony and LexarType A and Type B CFexpress, the TOUGH SD line from Sony, and the Gold and Professional ranges.

CFexpress and XQDAngelbird, Nikon and Sony: sealed and fast, and when one stops working it has to go to the bench.

What that message about the card is telling you.

Say what yours is doing →

What is happening	What usually causes it	What that means for you
Canon: Memory card error. Other cameras tell you a card cannot be accessed	That body cannot read the file system on it	Take it out, then leave it alone
Canon DSLR: Reinsert/change the card, after it says Card cannot be accessed	Dirty contacts — or a controller going	Say no to the format prompt
Nikon: This card may be damaged, then a request for another card	Damaged card, or simply nothing recognised	Never format it inside the camera
Card locked, or card write-protected, on screen	The tab on the side, or a controller that has shut itself down	Tab already up? Then the card itself is faulty
Windows will not open it until you format it	The volume shows as RAW in Windows, while every frame remains untouched	Refuse the prompt, whatever it says
It says No memory card, with a card inserted	Gone at the controller, or gone at the pads	Chip-level work from this point

From the parcel arriving to the files going home.

Jobs already finished →

Booked in the day it arrives, and the first look is on us Free

Your case number is assigned when the item is received. Then an engineer works out what went wrong (no charge). At this point, you receive a basic summary of which parts are recoverable and which are not. You also receive a single written quote for the price of the recovery. Accept the quoted price or turn it down, and there is no obligation to pay anything.

The first look is freeOne fixed figure, in writingNo charge at this point

The card is never written to

Your card isn't worked on. A complete bit-for-bit copy is pulled from it, the original goes in a sleeve, and from then on all operations are performed on the copy.

A sector-by-sector clone comes firstNothing is written back to your media

File tables mended, or frames carved out

That image is what the repairs are done to. If enough of the index remains to rebuild the file tables, folder names come back with their pictures. When not enough survives, each file is identified by its first bytes and extracted individually. At this point, RAW works just like JPEG.

Identified by their file headersBoth JPEG and RAW

Nothing leaves here unchecked

A file count is meaningless. Each recovered image is opened by hand, and each must render in full at the resolution the camera recorded.

Each image opened by handFull-size frames, not thumbnails

The file list comes before the bill

A complete file list will be provided before any invoicing. Simply say "yes" or "no" to what we found: yes means it is billed, no means it is not, and in most cases you only pay if we recover your data. What we find is posted to you on media purchased specifically for your case, at no additional cost to you. We consider the process complete once you have opened those files yourself on your own computer.

Nothing is charged until you agree the figureNew media, bought in for your jobWe pay to send it home

What comes in most often

One thing no lab can fix is a counterfeit memory card: the controller has been told the memory holds more than it actually does. Write beyond that and the file is accepted, then dropped, because it never made it to the chip. Since it never arrived, there is no way to recover it.
Suspect a card? Write to it until it is completely full, then check every byte that comes back. On Windows that is H2testw, and on Mac and Linux F3. Looking at the label will do you no good, since the fake number is stored in the registers the card reports from; your operating system, the packaging and the printed capacity all repeat it.
One moulded part is how all modern cards are made: flash die and controller are both set into a single piece of resin. Once a card stops responding, the work shifts to very small pads on the die. At no point does a card reader come into it.
A format repairs nothing. What the camera does is rewrite the tables (folder names, picture order, dates) over the records that held them.

A figure nobody actually holds: nobody can say with certainty how many counterfeit cards exist. Manufacturers and labs say they are common, we see a lot, and every estimate in print started as someone's best guess. It makes little difference either way: data written beyond a fake card's real capacity is lost for good.

One of these, from start to finish.

NG · NTG-2026-1929ON THE LOG ✓

The card filled at an evening wedding and was empty by breakfast

A 512GB SanDisk appeared empty first thing in the morning; by the end of the job, all the pictures were back. Nothing was written to the card. An exact duplicate was made from it, and every attempt after that ran against the duplicate. Rebuilding the file system recovered most of the files, and a deep carve pulled out the photos whose directory entries had gone. The customer stayed with the photographer.

Each frame lifted off the card48 hours of work on it

What helps, and what does damage.

Worth doing first

Remove the card from the camera once, then leave it alone
Store it in a hard case, or tape it flat against stiff card
Say which camera it came out of and what was shot
Copy out the error message word for word

What makes it harder

Agreeing to the camera's format prompt and hoping
Carrying on shooting once something has gone wrong
Turning free utilities loose on the original card
Trying it in one card reader after another

Answers before you spend anything.

The camera wants to format the card. Do I let it?

Don't. A format writes a new index over the top of the one that held photo names, folders and times, and anything recovered afterwards arrives as unnamed collections of bytes. Left untouched, a card gives back much more of its original layout along with the photos.

Will RAW files come back, or only the JPEGs?

RAW shots too. What carving looks for is the signature at the beginning of each file. RAF, DNG, ARW, NEF and CR3 all begin with one, and video wrapper formats follow the same idea. Many jobs here come from professionals.

The card has snapped in half. Are the pictures gone?

Often not. A modern card has one die holding everything, so it comes down to whether the break crossed it. If it did not, the pads should still be reachable directly. Either way the card itself is junk; it is the photos that matter.

How soon will the card be back?

Faster than anything else we do. Two or three working days sees most cards back with customers, and less when there is a tight deadline. Give us your due date and we will schedule back from it.

Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.

Sticks and pen drives → When the photos have gone → USB and Thunderbolt drives → Start with what it is doing →

Switched off, a drive cannot get any worse.

The look costs nothing. It gives you a file listing of what opened and what did not, along with the cost of finishing the job, in writing, before anything chargeable begins. In most cases you only pay if we recover your data. Do not switch the drive on until you have that listing.

0115 8220606

Get a quote, then send it Posting it to Manchester

Disks, cards and whole machines

Start with what it is doing

Footage, forensics and reports

The price, and what happens next