Hacking DEAD My MicroSD

[FahQ]

Depending on how long you've had your microsd it might just have crapped out. I had an old PNY 128GB in my 3ds that I copied to and from, backed-up and formatted, and so on so many times. After a while they WILL NOT work anymore. They can wear out and this is well documented so I kinda assume that's not it but if you've used it as much as I used mine it's just dead because it's old.
(Also because PNY is trash)

 

[Thetoto]

with lsusb on linux can you see your card ?

 

[RetroGamer732]

Depending on how long you've had your microsd it might just have crapped out. I had an old PNY 128GB in my 3ds that I copied to and from, backed-up and formatted, and so on so many times. After a while they WILL NOT work anymore. They can wear out and this is well documented so I kinda assume that's not it but if you've used it as much as I used mine it's just dead because it's old.
(Also because PNY is trash)

I had the card for 6 Months, so I honestly doubt it just died naturally.

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with lsusb on linux can you see your card ?

Kind of, It shows up as the card reader, but that happens both if I have the microSD in the adapter or not.

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Does your reader work for other cards, or indeed do you have another reader/computer you can try it in? I would expect to see that more with a bad reader or USB.

It is not impossible that the SD card decided to fail at that moment, or one preceded the other, but if those are the error results I would be surprised for it to be the hacked device you were running it on that normally does SD quite happily. If it was some hack job reader that applied too many volts then so be it but it is still a switch and your PC that were speaking to it.

Depending upon the particular failure that happened to cause that then there still may be means of dragging the data back, it is fairly slow and quite exotic as these things go (short version is SD cards tend to have two modes of operation, if the controller crashes for one which would happily show what you see there then you might still have the other). http://hackaday.com/2013/08/19/rescuing-an-sd-card-with-an-arduino/ being nice jumping off point into that world.

To start, It died in the Switch, not in my PC. The reader has worked for that card and all my other cards ever since I’ve had this computer, and this is the first time I’ve had any problems with my SDs on Console’s (I had a 16GB card die in my phone, but it was a 3/4 Year old card, so I figured It was going to die soon anyways).

I wish I knew the answer to all that, In fact, I’ll see about recreating the problem and see If It kills another card, or If it works (I haven’t gotten LayeredFS to even work, so there’s that).

I doubt my data’s still there as I’ve tried every kind of format I could in order to at least save the card, but I’ll take a look. Thanks

 

[FAST6191]

While not entirely irrelevant where it died if you have the means to test it on another setup then it does eliminate problems and is a good sanity check.

Data wise if the format never took (and the errors you describe make that a distinct possibility) as it could never write/read it in the first place then it might still be there.

"6 Months, so I honestly doubt it just died naturally"
If you saw how cheap and nasty flash memory manufacture actually is, especially for the higher sizes*, you might change your tune.
For a start/other curious people playing along at home the following presentation has some good stuff


*short version is flash memory makers will aim to make the largest one they can, various cells will inevitably fail (quite often in the millions and millions). Depending upon how many fail in a given chip depends upon what the end result card size will be called (say you are making 8 gig cards, don't have enough to make an 8 with one chip you got but do have enough to make 4 so you do, same again for 2 gig, 1 gig, 512 meg...). It is also why things did the usual power of 2 size increase for a while but now we have all weird numbers between 128 and 256 as well as 256 and 512 GB.

To out and out kill a SD card with software is then a very hard task (see the video for methods of how), assuming you are not just stress testing it to death. If it was some hacked together board that occasionally sends bit voltage spikes down it or something then that is one thing. The Switch for all its many failures does seem to treat SD cards right, not to mention is a consumer device that has millions of active units. If it was in the habit of eating SD cards we would have heard of other things. Messing up a partitioning, file system, individual file... is absolutely something I would expect to see when messing around with bleeding edge homebrew but straight electrical failures like you are describing is not.

 

[hellrokr]

All is not lost. I hope you can claim your warranty. These cards have a warranty for 5 years to lifetime.

 

[shchmue]

yeah I'm not gonna say it's impossible the software killed it but this does remind me a lot of how in PC repair you'll see a hard drive die after installing a new antivirus, then people get mad at the antivirus company when the reality is that hard drive was poised to fail and the software that's designed to scan everything on the drive thereby interacts with a bunch of sectors quickly and just weeded out the failure sooner rather than later

since nobody asked, did you test with h2testw or equivalent before using the card?

 

[grozio]

today with a sd card verbatim 128 giga..happened same thing...is died...first time for me.
i bought 1 month ago on amazon....amazing...

 

[RetroGamer732]

All is not lost. I hope you can claim your warranty. These cards have a warranty for 5 years to lifetime.

It’s a Samsung card, so I’m looking into warranty stuff now, but that’s really helpful to know

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yeah I'm not gonna say it's impossible the software killed it but this does remind me a lot of how in PC repair you'll see a hard drive die after installing a new antivirus, then people get mad at the antivirus company when the reality is that hard drive was poised to fail and the software that's designed to scan everything on the drive thereby interacts with a bunch of sectors quickly and just weeded out the failure sooner rather than later

since nobody asked, did you test with h2testw or equivalent before using the card?

No, just popped it in my Switch

 

[shchmue]

It’s a Samsung card, so I’m looking into warranty stuff now, but that’s really helpful to know

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No, just popped it in my Switch

theoretically we should be able to rely on the quality of a good brand bought from a reputable dealer, but there's always a chance for bad cards to slip through QA. it's always a good idea to test straight out of the box. I picked up the habit from 3DS hacking, where a bad write at the wrong stage could brick your handheld - Plailect's guides all have a disclaimer about it.