How to recover SD (internal storage) from Android 6.0

[Benjai Yuen]

Dear all,

My SD card was corrupted and the phone keeps asking me to format it, it was used as part of internal storage in Android 6.0

I have put it into my computer and scanned with different recovery software, but no luck

I guess the card may be encrypted by Android

Could anyone have ideas how to recover the photos inside?

Many thanks in advance

Benjai :'(

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! That's a good question--I'm not sure if you'll be able to recover anything. If you turned the card into adoptable storage, that means the card was reformatted into ext4 and encrypted, making it another part of the phone's internal storage. Therefore, photos won't necessarily be stored on a discrete directory in that card itself, since that data may be spread out among the other eMMC chips.

Trying to recover data from a phone's internal storage requires rooting and special data recovery software, so I'm not sure how that'd apply to an SD card being used as adoptable storage. This is the main reason why I am not excited at all about the whole idea of adoptable storage. Consumer-grade SD cards are relatively low quality memory compared to eMMC, and therefore more prone to failure or corruption. On top of that, there are also plenty of counterfeit cards out there that claim to be high storage, but are actually low storage (and if you try to save more than they can actually hold, they can get corrupted). So if you're going to rely on this kind of memory to become an integral part of your phone's internal storage, it's kind of like rolling the dice.