How to repair corrupt jpg files/restore data from a corrupt SD card

This post is exceptionally not about virtualization – but maybe it is usefull for you in the near future…

My brother’s 8 GB SD card became unreadable/damaged as it was removed while there was read/write access to it.

From about 500 pictures of the last holiday only 20 were readable. When opening the other ones, the following errors came up:

  • Decode error! JPEG datastream contains no image!
  • Can’t open this picture because the file appears to be damaged, corrupted, or is too large

We tried checkdisk (chkdsk /F and chkdsk /r) and a lot of other free available data restore/recovery tools.

Most of them were not really free and you had to pay before you really knew if they can help you.

Finally I found a tool that helped us to restore all the photos (or nearly all… only ten out of 500 were definitely lost or garbled).

The name of the tool is Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery (ZAR).

Generally the software is not free of charge, but the digital image recovery function of ZAR is available at no charge. And this function is the one we need 🙂

You can download the software here: Download Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery (ZAR)

After installation, open ZAR and select Image Recovery (Free):

ZAR1

In the next step select the broken SD Card Drive:

ZAR2

Now the software starts to analyse your SD card. Depending on the size this step can take some time/hours…

ZAR3

But it is worth to wait – because now you are only one step away to (hopefully) restore your data.

In the next window you can select the pictures/files ZAR found on your SD Card. Select all files you want to restore:

zar4

Now enter a path to restore and select “start copying the selected files”:

zar5

If you are lucky, most or all of your files are restored/reconstructed:

after_restore

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