The most effective way to recover photos from a corrupted SD card is to use professional data recovery software like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Windows. But before we go any further, let's work on your corrupted SD card first and see if it can be fixed.
According to your description, the SD card is not showing up on your Windows computer and is corrupted. Have you properly connected it to your PC? An improper connection would make the computer fail to detect your SD card and fools you into thinking that it is a corrupted SD card. So check the connection first.
If there's no problem with the connection, then there's a high chance that your SD card is corrupted due to some logical errors. Under this circumstance, you can try to use the CHKDSK command to fix it on your Windows computer. Here's how to do it:
- Enter cmd into the bottom Search Box on your computer to open Command Prompt.
- Right-click on the Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.
- Enter the following command into the Command Prompt window. Remember to replace the drive letter G with that of your SD card.
chkdsk G: /R - Press Enter on your keyboard and wait until the process is completed.
If unfortunately, CHKDSK fails to fix your corrupted SD card, then your best shot is to first retrieve all your photos from the card using third-party data recovery tools, then fix the card by formatting it. Here, I recommend iBoysoft Data Recovery for Windows, the most powerful data recovery software on the market.
Follow these steps to recover photos from your SD card:
- Free download, install, and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Windows on your PC.
- Properly connect your corrupted SD card to the computer.
- On the main interface of this software, choose the Data Recovery module and select your corrupted SD card from the drive list, then click the Next button.
- Select the photos you want to recover, and click Preview to check if they are corrupted.
- Tick the box of the wanted photos and click the Recover button to save them to a different location. Do not save them back to the corrupted SD card, it may cause permanent data loss.
After successfully recovering your important photos from the corrupted SD card, you can fix it by formatting your SD card on your Windows computer.