I set my SD card as adoptable storage and all my info is locked now

[Android Central Question]

My phone type is Lenovo Vibe C2 Power. I set my sd card as adoptable storage on my phone. The SD card type is san disk(32GB). The phone was working fine for about 4 months. Then all of a sudden it stopped working (Whenever I turn on the device it gets stuck on the Lenovo Logo forever, I tried leaving it for 24 hrs and it still didn't open), however when I removed the SD card the phone works properly, but I lost all my photos, videos, and memories. The issue is that my phone does not work with the SD card in it and the SD card is locked so when I put it on my PC I can't access my photos or videos. When I check the properties of the SD card it says that it has 16 megabites of storage. However on disk manager there appears to be a 28 gigabites locked partation. I tried entering the sd card after the phone booted up using a otg connector, but the phone didn't read the SD card. How can I access the partition that was locked by the android? I tried almost all the recovery apps and non of them worked including EaseUs. What shall I do? I don't want to lose all those memories or format the SD card. I need a way to recover my lost photos, videos, and memories.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! The discrepancy in reported size suggests the card is counterfeit -- i.e., someone took a smaller card and programmed it to report a larger size. This is not uncommon, and can be a problem if you try to save more on the card than it can handle, since it can lead to data corruption. Also, formatting the card as Internal Storage means that it became encrypted by the system, and I don't think there's a way for the user to manually decrypt the card. So the combination of those two factors means that it will be close to impossible to recover the data. You'd probably have to bring it to a forensic data recovery specialist, but that can be very expensive. Sorry!

 

[Kodak2]

Counterfeit cards are just too common on eBay. Always buy from a well-known retailer, if the price look too good to be true, then beware. I've never been a fan of adoptable formatting unless you really need it. External is much safer.

 

[B. Diddy]

Counterfeit cards are just too common on eBay. Always buy from a well-known retailer, if the price look too good to be true, then beware. I've never been a fan of adoptable formatting unless you really need it. External is much safer.

Agree x1000.

 

[Rukbat]

The other problem is that the card can't be read by, not only your PC, but not by another Lenovo Vibe C2 Power. Adaptable storage sets the card as part of the phones file system. Putting it into any other device is like ripping a part of a hard drive out of a computer and pasting it into another computer. It can't work.

I'd suggest that you try PhotoRec to recover whatever you can from the card (it ignores the card's filesystem and just looks for files). Once you've gotten as much as you can, try formatting the card in your PC to see how large it is. It may not be counterfeit - adoptable storage puts a lot of strain on the card that it's not designed for, and can cause it to fail quickly.

(Also, the amount of storage and the amount of free storage on a card formatted as adoptable storage, when it's in a PC, is impossible to determine. The card is formatted sort of as ext4 (not NTFS or FAT32), and Windows can't handle ext filesystems, so it reports what it thinks it sees, which is like hearing someone speak Greek [if you don't understand it] and reporting what he's saying - in English.)