Just a quick post to help anyone who might be in this situation and doesn’t know what to do and also doesn’t have the 500+ Euro to spend hiring professional data recovery services. My wife recently had that SD-card which died directly while being used in her Android-phone and had photos and videos on it of our baby which obviously she had no backup and they would be lost forever, so she asked me for help. After some research I found the free (GNU) software called Testdisk, which allows lots of different kind of data recovery. I tried it out and was astonished: it not only detected the completely lost partition table (normal partitioning tools and harddisk-repair tools I tried had all failed), but it also restored it and almost all data was recovered without any problems! I highly recommend it to anyone who has a memory card, harddisk or any other storage medium which is not readable or recoverable with normal tools. The program also works in a very careful way, in case it is not able to restore, you still can take the medium to the professional, it won’t mess up anything more than it just is.
Good luck! You might need a little patience until understanding exactly how to work with it – at least the selection and recovery process of the files it finds is a little confusing, but there’s a high chance it will succeed.
On another note: this blog isn’t dead, ok?! You might think that because of no new posts for the last months, but it’s just been complicated to find time to write anything on here, between being a father, a husband, my full-time job, my music and everything else…. I promise I will try to post a bit more often from now on…