Recover your Photos from Locked SD Card in a Trouble Free Way

Those who like to capture HD photos and videos, use digital cameras, typically a DSLR. In fact, such high-definition cameras take eye-pleasing and real-time photos, each of around 6 MB of space acquired on the SD card. Using SD cards as the storage media in such cameras make your photos and videos portable. Besides, you can easily copy/move photos and videos from the SD card to your computer. 

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Based on your requirements, you can have an SD of massive storage capacity, viz. 8 GB or 16 GB. For instance, if you are a professional photographer, it is obvious for you to have SD cards of such high storage capacities. However, you must be pretty careful while inserting it into or ejecting it out of the camera. Otherwise, these flash memory chips may get corrupt or the camera may fail to read/write it.

Using SD Cards

SD cards are one of the major portable sources of memory, which are used in multiple mobile devices and gadgets, such as smart phones, digital cameras, tablets, MP3 players, etc., while some of these devices have large internal storage. However, when it comes to digital cameras and DSLRs, using SD card is the only option left since there is no internal storage provided. 

One of the major issues with the SD cards is that you have to eject them out of the camera oftentimes. In fact, every time you insert into or eject the SD card, there are countless numbers of chances that the SD card can gets damaged due to improper handling. If such an incidents happens, your camera or even the PC may not detect the SD card.

SD Card Corruption

The SD card is nothing but a flash memory chip, which is portable means for data storage and is used in multiple multimedia gadgets, smart phones, tablets, and the like. The SD card installed in your digital camera often becomes full with the photos taken and you eject it out of the camera. 

You hook up the SD card to your PC and move the entire stuff to its hard drive. However, you must be careful while connecting and ejecting these flash memory chips, as improper ejection or pullout may cause corruption or the SD card failure.

In spite of the aforementioned causes of SD cards corruption, factors like water, heat, dust, and improper management also contribute equally and result in the loss of your personal photos or like stuff. You may or may not believe that the SD cards often get damaged due to unknown causes. In other words, SD cards may fail at any time, no matter how carefully and wisely, you act while operating with them. 

SD Card Inaccessible

Since SD cards are fragile, you need to take a lot of care while dealing with them. Otherwise, you may not find them taking a moment to get corrupt. For example, you eject the SD card from your DSLR to move the recently taken photos to your PC. 

After you are done moving those photos, you experience problem while installing the SD again in the camera. You apply a bit more force to get it installed. You power on the camera, but OMG! The camera shows Error “Memory Card Error – Card Locked.” Lets us take a scenario for illustration of this event.

You eject out the SD camera from your digital camera, as it fails to store more photos. However, your PC fails to detect this card. You right click the card reader in Windows Explorer to see its properties, but it shows 0 KB as the size of the disk. You eject the card and install it back in the camera. Unfortunately, the camera shows the same error, i.e.

Memory Card Error – Card Locked.

What can be the issue that is causing this problem? In such a scenario, you may sink into chaos wondering how it can happen. To verify whether the SD card is corrupt, you install another SD card in the camera, but it works. Then you try installing the failed one in your friend's camera, but the error persists.

Locked SD Card Recovery

When your SD card is reported as locked and you no longer can access your photos, you without wasting your time should use a commercial photo recovery software. Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery software enables digital photo recovery software from a range of storage devices, including the portable ones, such as the SD cards, CF cards, USB flash drives, and more.

The software thoroughly scans the concerned storage media connected to Windows platform, and then displays the scan result in a three-pane window. The software has an 'Advanced Scan' option, which allows you to scan the media for photos, audio and video files of specific 'file type' only. In addition, you can perform this search on the entire or a specific region of the hard drive, aiming to narrow down the search. 

You can filter the scan result for selected media recovery as well as save the scan information (*.DAT file) for recovery at a later time. In case the concerned media is a data traveler or a portable drive like a SD card, you can create its image (*.IMG file) that can also be used for digital photo recovery in a trouble-free way.

Note: The concerned storage media must be connected to your PC for recovery from the saved scan information file, but not for recovery from the media image.

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