SD card no longer recognised in S7 or laptop after latest update?

[Android Central Question]

After installing the latest update to the Samsung S7 two days ago, I can no longer access my SD card on my S7. Removed it from the phone and connected to my Inspiron 15 3000 series laptop via the Lexar card reader and keep getting "Please insert a disk into Drive D:" when attempting to access the card.
It was working literally yesterday while at a house viewing and I showed the current flatmates photos of my cat, which the album is on the SD card. Today tried to access same album and it and all the others saved to my SD card just won't show up. Went to Storage and only the internal storage shows with the SD card not mounted.
What is going on? I've tried downloading two data recovery applications to my laptop to no avail, and even Disk Management ca't load the USB any more to try and format it. Please help

 

[etfoliumxo]

Created an account to keep track of this thread better, I'm the OP

 

[belodion]

^ Welcome.

I'll move the thread to the S7 forum, although I'm not sure that your problem is device-specific. Let's try it there though.

 

[etfoliumxo]

Update over the past 5 hours.
So far I've tried using;
EaseUS Data Recovery - no result/couldn't recognise the SD card whatsoever
MiniTools Power Data Recovery - no result
MiniTools Android Data Recover - have to root the phone to get past step 2 apparently which I'm not comfortable doing
Have tried via the USB cable to the phone, as well as directly inserting the micro SD via the Lexar USB supporter

Have turned on Developer tools to no avail
What's going on?! This SD card was working fine up until last night and this morning nothing.
Do I have any hope of recovering the photo albums on it? As Samsung Cloud failed to properly back the folders up and on restore gave me junk files from some apps but no photos.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! If the computer doesn't even recognize the card, then unfortunately the card has probably failed. I'm not sure any conventional recovery program will work, because the computer has to be able to detect the card in the first place. It's hard to say if the update did this, or if it was purely coincidence -- Samsung has a past history of their phones messing up SD cards, although this was back in the S4 days. The fact of the matter is that SD cards are inherently much less reliable than onboard memory, and are prone to corruption or failure -- so one should never rely on an SD card as the sole storage for important data.

 

[etfoliumxo]

Welcome to Android Central! If the computer doesn't even recognize the card, then unfortunately the card has probably failed. I'm not sure any conventional recovery program will work, because the computer has to be able to detect the card in the first place. It's hard to say if the update did this, or if it was purely coincidence -- Samsung has a past history of their phones messing up SD cards, although this was back in the S4 days. The fact of the matter is that SD cards are inherently much less reliable than onboard memory, and are prone to corruption or failure -- so one should never rely on an SD card as the sole storage for important data.

Sigh, I thought so.
And I wasn't relying on just the SD card, all the photos were backed up to the Samsung Cloud which has also failed to restore them since the SD card has gone kaput. It's just a frustrating situation when I know I'd backed everything up weekly to the Cloud as well and yet that now can't restore the photos either? I've just been given junk app data of things I never even downloaded so it's a weird situation all up.
I'm not going to give up on the photos though, I'll be inquiring about data recovery from a few places to see what the costs will be - and I am well aware I may not recover anything, that doesn't mean I still shouldn't try. I'm just really annoyed at this whole situation knowing I'd done what I could on my end to have these things backed up properly. Due to having limited access to a shared laptop, backing the photos up to said laptop wasn't an option so I was heavily reliant on the Cloud in that regards.

Thanks anyway

 

[B. Diddy]

Tough situation -- I hope you have some success with recovery! I don't have direct experience with Samsung Cloud, but it sounds like the inability to have a web-based interface (like Google Drive or Google Photos) is a significant limitation. I usually recommend backing up photos to Google Photos instead. Remember that it's unlimited, if you set it to High Quality (up to 16 megapixel quality, with a fairly minimal amount of compression).

 

[joebullock]

I literally had the same thing happen. It can't be just our sd cards. Worked before the update and then right after it didn't recognize it.

After installing the latest update to the Samsung S7 two days ago, I can no longer access my SD card on my S7. Removed it from the phone and connected to my Inspiron 15 3000 series laptop via the Lexar card reader and keep getting "Please insert a disk into Drive D:" when attempting to access the card.
It was working literally yesterday while at a house viewing and I showed the current flatmates photos of my cat, which the album is on the SD card. Today tried to access same album and it and all the others saved to my SD card just won't show up. Went to Storage and only the internal storage shows with the SD card not mounted.
What is going on? I've tried downloading two data recovery applications to my laptop to no avail, and even Disk Management ca't load the USB any more to try and format it. Please help