Devices · SD and camera cards
Cards pick their moment: halfway through a holiday, or halfway through the copy that was meant to be the backup. They are one of the commonest things posted in from Hull and the East Riding. A card that reads blank, or locked, or as nothing at all will usually give its pictures up. The condition is that no one has formatted it first.
An engineer will take the details
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| What you see | What the fault is | What to try |
|---|---|---|
| Memory card error on a Canon, or Cannot access the memory card | The body can no longer read the file system | Eject it and stop there |
| Card cannot be accessed, then Reinsert/change the card (Canon DSLR) | Contacts wanting a clean, or a failing controller | Say no to the format |
| Nikon body: Card may be damaged. Insert another card | Physical damage, or nothing recognised | Do not format it in the body |
| Card locked / Card is write-protected | The little slider on the card edge — or a controller locked shut | If the slider is fine, the fault is the card |
| Format the disk before you can use it | Windows reports RAW instead of a file system; the frames are untouched | Do not agree to it |
| No memory card, with a card plainly in the slot | A dead controller, or contact pads that have gone | That means chip-level work |
Each item that arrives gets a case number the day it lands. An engineer looks at it and finds the real fault, and that costs you nothing. You are told in plain terms which files can come off the drive and which cannot. A price follows — one figure, written down. No work starts until you have seen it and agreed to it.
The first job is a bit-for-bit clone. After that the card goes back in its sleeve, and everything we run afterwards runs on the copy.
Every repair is made to that clone. Where the file tables can be put back, your folder names come with them. Where they cannot, frames are lifted on their header bytes alone — RAW is no harder than JPEG.
A count of files proves nothing at all. The recovered shoot is opened image by image, and every one has to draw in full, at the size it came off the camera.
You are not billed while you are still thinking. The list of what came off the drive goes to you first, and the invoice waits on your word. Files go home on media bought in for the job, with the postage back on us. We keep the job open until you have opened them on your own machine.
The number nobody actually has: there is no reliable count of how many fake cards are on sale. Labs and manufacturers agree the problem is broad, fakes reach this bench regularly, and every hard percentage you see in print was a guess. The true figure changes nothing about the rule — whatever was written past a fake card's real capacity is beyond any lab.
The wedding had been shot the evening before; by morning the 512GB SanDisk showed as empty. The card was cloned before anything else was attempted. The file system came back out of that clone, and a deep carve then collected the fragments that no longer had a home. Every frame was there, and the photographer kept the client.
No. A format lays fresh file tables over the very records that hold your folder and file names. Leave the card alone and more of it comes back, with the names still attached.
RAW as well. A carve matches file signatures, and CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG and RAF each have one; video containers work in the same fashion. A lot of what lands on this bench belongs to working photographers.
Often not. A monolith card keeps everything on a single die. If the break missed that die, a chip-level read is still possible. The card is scrap whichever way it goes.
Cards are the quickest work in the building. Most are done within two or three working days, and faster when a deadline demands it. Tell us the day you need them by and the work is planned back from there.
Leave it switched off. A failing drive has a limited number of starts in it, and each one spends a little more. The free diagnosis will say which files can be read.