Monolithic SD Card RecoveryWe recently received a project that involved an SD card that would not detect in Windows at all. When we removed it from its plastic casing with the plan to do a chip off recovery, we discovered that it was a monolithic device with the NAND embedded in the circuit board.

Not wanting to quote our client a high cost for a monolithic physical recovery, we tried various different recovery systems to see if we might just get a break. Within Linux, we saw a glimmer of hope, as it showed that it was able to identify the full capacity of the SD card. Unfortunately, every attempt to access any sector on the SD card resulted in locking up the system.

Then came our DeepSpar Disk Imager. We connected the SD card to the system via a SD to SATA bridge and, to our amazement, we were able to image about 95% of the sectors. From the image, we were able to recover most of the client’s lost photos, making for a successful recovery at our minimum rate of $150.