Hi all:

I am on a shoot, we are using DSLRs and a Tascam DR40 digital audio recorder. Using a Kensington 16GB SD card and Tascam DR40. Have used this combo before with no issues. Shot all day yesterday, interviews, presentations. Went to shoot again this morning and when I booted up the Tascam this morning to shoot an interview, it greeted me with a "cannot read SD card, do you want to format?" All of our interviews and a one hour presentation audio was recorded on this SD card.

The way the Tascam formats SD cards, they don't seem to be readable by my Mac's SD card slot but have always read fine when using the Tascam as a card reader. Does anyone here have any experience with corrupt header files on SD cards? There are quite a few different data recovery programs available for Mac, and I know I can take it to a data recovery service that will cost a lot of money. This audio is very important to our project but I can't pay thousands of dollars to recover the audio. I don't know if any of the software recovery programs are worthwhile, I have used various utilities to recover files from a corrupted hard drive, but I have never tried this with an SD card. I have popped the "save" tab on the SD card but I can't clone it for safety so I only get one shot at repairing/recovering the audio files.

If you have successfully recovered audio/video files from an SD card, any advice on what to do from here is appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan Brockett

Hi Dan, . I assume you formatted the card in the DR-40 prior to recording? The full format mode is recommended for new cards never used before in the Tascam... takes a while to format but no problems with cards I've tried that were not on Tascam's tested card list. .. however I haven't tried a Kensington card
I would try a file recover utility. I usually turn to Piriform's Recuva (free ver) which has a deep scan mode that works well recovering audio files.. but that's a Windows program. Borrow a Win PC and try it.
Regards, Rick

Tascam's tested card list:
http://tascam.com/content/downloads/products/706/dr40_20110930.pdf

Hi Rick:

Thanks for the advice. I did do the full format for the reasons you outlined. I luckily found out that even though the Tascam DR40 won't read the card, my Macbook Pro's SD card slot did read it, all of the files were intact and play fine. Put the same card back into the Tascam and it still doesn't read it. Obviously the header/ID file somehow became messed up.

So the good news is the audio was saved. I am getting rid of this Kensington card and replacing it with Sandisk.

Thanks,

Dan