Morning all,

My Mum has given me an SD card which has a bunch of images on, but her computer and camera can't read it. Mum can't remember if she turned the camera off, or if it turned itself off after she last used the card successfully, but the batteries were still working, just not the card (camera asking to format it which Mum didn't).
I've shoved it in my iMac and I can see the raw device, but it won't mount (and Disk Utility will ask to initialise it).

The card is a 2GB Viking card, it seems to be a rebranded Toshiba SD-M02G

I have tried using Testdisk and Photorec, TestDisk reports that it can't find a partition, Photorec has been running for over 47 hours and says there is over 69 hours to go...Photorec keeps reporting "Error reading sector 1629849", or whatever sector it appears to be working on.
I almost tried ddrescue, but it appears to be no good unless you can mount the file system...

Can anyone give me any ideas? Part of me is wondering if I should try and quick format it, my thinking being that it would give it a partition structure (pretty much the same as before) and might give the recovery software some sort of chance to see where it should look?

EDIT: dd is also reporting input/output errors from the raw device.

Many thanks for any advice,
Ben

Before going any further, I'd create a disk image of it first and work on the disk image instead of the actual SD card - the more utilities you test on it the less chance of retrieving anything useful.

Have you looked at ProSoft's Data Rescue 3? I've heard good things about it, you can download a demo version which will only retrieve one file, but at least you can try before you pay for a licence.

A lot of the Mac disk repair utilities don't work on FAT formatted drives, only HFS+ ones. I wouldn't format it at this stage though.

ProSoft's Data Rescue 3 didn't like it, the deep scan couldn't find any files, but it said it was 100% done before it actually started

dd wasn't having any of it, so I doubt Disk Utility will be any better, but I'm trying that now to create a disk image.

Nope, Disk Utility refused to take a disk image from it

Stellar Phoenix isn't bad, likewise SanDisk Rescue Pro.