How to Repair & Recover a Corrupted SD Card on Mac

In terms of storage devices, Secure Digital cards, also known as SD cards, are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. But like other external storage devices, they can get corrupted over time. A corrupted Android SD card or SD card used for other purposes usually means that your saved data is on the verge of losing.

After I failed to copy my SD card files on Mac, my MacBook showed "The disk you attached was not readable by this computer", what does it mean? Is it corrupted or damaged? Any recovery app recommended? -reddit.com

If you face the issues below, you may have a corrupted SD card.

It's highly recommended that you should stop using it immediately, especially do not add any new information to the corrupted SD card. Then you'd recover files from corrupted SD card on Mac, and make sure your precious data remains safe and sound. Last, you can fix/repair the corrupted SD card on Mac with the solutions given in this post.

First step: Recover files from a corrupted SD card on Mac

The most effective and easiest way to perform corrupted SD card recovery on Mac is to use third-party SD card recovery software. Though sometimes data stored on a corrupted SD card remains inaccessible, with the sophisticated scanning algorithms employed by this kind of program, you can still get your data.

Here, we recommend using iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover files from your corrupted SD card on Mac. It is a reliable and effective SD card recovery tool that can help users restore 1000+ types of files from corrupted SD cards and micro SD cards, including images, videos, documents, audio, archives, and other files.

In addition to SD card data recovery, it supports recovering deleted or lost files from APFS, HFS, HFS+, exFAT, and FAT 32 formatted SD cards. 

Here's how to recover lost files from SD card on Mac using iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac:

After recovering data from the SD card on Mac, you can now follow the solutions below to fix corrupted SD card on Mac. But for those physically damaged SD cards, you'd better seek help from a professional data recovery center or a data recovery service. 

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How to fix or repair a corrupted SD card on Mac?

Sometimes, an SD card wouldn't even show up on your Mac computer and appear to be corrupted due to improper connection. So, here's what you can do to make sure your Mac can recognize the card:

If your SD card is truly corrupted and you are sure about is nothing to do with the connection, you can try the following solutions one by one to fix the corrupted SD card on Mac.

Solution 1: Fix a corrupted SD card on Mac via Disk Utility

File system errors may lead to a corrupted SD card. In this case, you can try to use the Mac Disk Utility app to repair your corrupted SD card on Mac. Disk Utility is a built-in tool that comes with macOS, which is able to fix some minor errors on the card.

Here's how to fix a corrupted SD card with Mac Disk Utility:

If Disk Utility can repair your corrupted SD card, then you will be able to access the card on your Mac computer. If unfortunately, Disk Utility fails, move on to the next solution.

Solution 2: Repair a corrupted SD card on Mac using Terminal

If after running First Aid but your SD card still shows signs of corruption, you can use Mac Terminal (a command line tool)to check for possible errors. But this method is a little bit complicated because it would resort to command lines, so be careful when following the steps below.

Here's how to check and repair corrupted SD card on Mac using Terminal:

After repairing the SD card with Terminal, check if it is still corrupted.

Solution 3: Fix a corrupted SD card on Mac by formatting

If you tried all the above solutions but still, the corrupted SD card won't be fixed, then your best shot is to format SD card on Mac. As you may know that all files would be erased from a formatted SD card, so make sure you've restored lost files from it using data recovery software, like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.

Here's how to format a corrupted SD card on Mac:

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Bouns: Possible reasons for SD card corruption

SD won't become corrupted inexplicably. Here, we list some common causes that might lead to SD corruption, let's check them out:

When the SD card turns corrupted, all your valuable data stored on it might remain inaccessible. In this situation, you can use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to get your data back.

Bottom line

In this article, we tell you how to fix and recover corrupted SD card on Mac. Also, explain the possible signs and reasons for SD card corruption.  Again, using iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover data from your corrupted SD card is highly recommended. Hope you can fix your corrupted SD card by reading this post!