Help! I may have lost my photos on my micro SD card!

[AC Question]

Help! I need advice as to wether I can do anything about my SD card or not. Today I went to access my "gallery" on my Samsung Galaxy S3 and none of my photos that are on the micro SD HTC card would not come up. I tried checking in settings where it shows storage and it says I need to "mount an SD card". Does this mean that my card has gone bad and I have lost all of my photos on it??? :'( I know my pictures were all there earlier today. I have not turned off the phone for any reason, the battery hasn't ran out and shut off the phone, I had not even removed the back of my phone to remove or change the SD card. I have charged and used my phone normally and this just happened. The phone has not been dropped or damaged either. Gaahhh! I just transferred all my photos a couple of months ago and cleaned the card off. So I know the card had alot of room left on it, but there are lots of pictures and video of my kids I don't want to lose. If I haven't already. :/ Kinda makes me wish I were an "over poster" on FB now! Then I would still have most of them. ] So when I discovered this, I removed the card and used its adapter to insert it in my computer , even checked that the lock was off on the adapter, it was not locked. But, my computer doesn't even recognize the card either. Any ideas as to what I can do?? Besides worry?

 

[Golfdriver97]

I think there are PC programs that can recover corrupted files. I don't know the names of any of them, but they may be able to help you get your files back.

 

[EdNTammy]

Thank you! I will check into that.

 

[Rukbat]

The best of those programs is PhotoRec - CGSecurity Burn it to a CD, boot the computer from the CD, mount the SD card in the computer (with an adapter) and let PhotoRec recover anything on the card. (It recovers data blocks that look like files, so even if the file got deleted, or the listing of where the file is got corrupted, it still recovers the file.)

About the only time it wont work is if the controller in the SD card is blown, so there's no way to connect to the memory chip (there's a whole little computer in that card). If that happens, the only way to recover the files is to put the memory chip into a card that has working chips (controller and ROM), and I can't think of a photo worth enough money to pay for that. (Maybe a picture of the combination to the safe at Fort Knox.)

 

[EdNTammy]

I like your sense of humor! How do I go about burning it to a CD? I followed all the instillation instructions and now my computer keeps popping up screen after screen say my computer needs to be cleaned and I have drivers out of date or missing (ones I dont care about frankly) and I need to purchase different software programs. If it is free why am I getting these messages? Did I install TOO much and miss the boxes somewhere that I should have unchecked? Or is this just what goes with the territory?