I have an SD card which has a lot of valuable family photos on it which I can no longer open.

Does anyone know of any businesses / services which can somehow extract the contents?

I have tried a few free bits of software but that doesn’t work, I need something more substantial.

have a go with a demo versio nof minitool power data recovery. If it works, the licence costs for the full versio nwill be much less than a 3rd party copmany.

Coincidentally Ive been using it over the last 24hrs to recover 20Gb+ of Music & images for my brother’s B-in-L from a knackered HDD. Nearly done.
I bought a licence a while ago when rescuing a distressed damsel’s HDD and it’s a very handy tool to own. Not enough people backup properly.

http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/free-data-recovery-help/digital-media-recovery.html

Great, thanks. I will take a look. I’m assuming the free version tells you if it can get your data but you need the paid version to actually do anything?

you can get 1Gb with the free version IIRC.

We’ve used the services of CBL Data Recovery at work two or three times over the years.

Maybe have a look at this… just an idea. Try a few different cables with a card reader. For some reason I found that some cables work, some don’t, maybe its a specific type that work with USB 2 and although they look the same, there may be some internal differences… Even though they have similar connectors some will work with my Garmin and some dont. Same with a card reader.

Have you tried Zero Assumption Recovery? They do a free tool for storage media only – I’ve used it twice on different cards and it works a treat..

Zero Assumption Recovery

Might be worth giving PhotoRec a go, its free and pretty easy to use:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

Not tried those, will give them a go and will report back tonight. Thanks

Have you tried Recuva, I think by Piriform?

How have you tried to open it so far? SD reader built into a laptop?

If you’ve only tried one reader, try plugging it into a different one, or putting it back in the camera and reading it from there?
Sorry to state the obvious if you’ve tried these options.

Is the card recognised at all? Does it show up as a drive but you can’t get anything off it, or does it not even show up?

You can access SD cards in a competely native fashion using an SPi data bus generated by a typical microcontroller (AVR, PIC etc) if you are really stuck, this would allow you to do a raw data dump of the bytes on the card. Putting all the data back together again could be a PITA though if there is lots of stuff on there!

just tried plugging the card in again, no longer being recognised (tried multiple PCs and card readers). Going to have to try one of these data recovery services I think.

But you have a backup right?

Try the sd card in lots of different devices, I have a mp3/4 player that litlerally reads anything. Had a similar situation to you.

Shame its not visible to the computer anymore. Photorec is great, free and without limitations or ads. It might be worth a shot.

I’ve had cards that a PC could not read, but I could read with a Linux box. Might be worth a try.

I have a 8Gb card here that was created on a Windows Phone, I’ve tried all sorts to re-format it but it just won’t show up. My understanding is that it needs another Windows Phone to re-format it.