I accidentally removed a MicroSD card from an Android device running Android 12 while it was being ejected. This happened because it took longer than usual (less than a few seconds), and I pulled it out without looking at the notification. Now, when I insert the MicroSD card into any Android device, it tells me to format it to use it, as a problem has occurred. It also gives me the option to format it and extend the internal storage. The third option is to skip both and do it later, which keeps the SD card unreadable by the system. The MicroSD card contains a lot of data that’s important to me, and unfortunately, I had no backup, as I always considered my MicroSD as an external storage medium for such data. I would really appreciate any help on how I can resolve this issue and make the SD card data accessible again by Android.
Thank you for reading! 🥲
Edit: Don’t ask me why or how. But I put the SD Card into a phone running Android 14, and booted it. The SD Card could be actually read by the phone after it finished booting. I turned the phone off again, pulled the SD card out and put it back into it’s original running Android 12 and magically it works again! My theory is that the Android 14 recognized and automatically fixed what was wrong and this made the card readable again to older Android versions.
Thanks to everyone who commented!
Do you have access to a computer with an sd card reader? I believe the best and safest thing to do is to connect it to a computer, create disk image from it and try ro use a data recovery tool in the image file.
Edit: if you only have the phone, maybe you could try looking for apps to copy a disk image from the sd card and to recover data or try using some terminal emulator or one of those apps that install a linux distro inside android to use the dd command and then use testdisk and photorec tools. I recommend the second option, because the tools are open sourc and well tested
Definitely this. The data is not likely gone, but before doing anything that could make things worse, try and get a full copy of the SD card somewhere. From there you may safely try repairing the partition or data carving tools.