Good news: all my 10+ video files have been recovered by a hacker expert on the 3rd floor of the Wan Chai computer market in Hong Kong (hkd$1600), he says they used a lab to open up the SD card and do some type of operation on the card, about an hour later they had all the files ready to be transfered back to my storage. Thanks to everyone who posted suggestions for how I could have done it myself!

Please let me know if you have a good idea for a way to recover the video files (I filmed about 20-30 videos today!) from a corrupted Patriot 32GB Class10 SD card. When I insert it to my PC it says that I have to format it before it can be used. I am worried to try to format it from Windows 7 or from my Sanyo HD1000 camcorder menu and restore the files after that.

I just paid $29 for http://www.wondershare.com/disk-utility/sd-card-recovery.html

“Photo Recovery 2012-04-14 at 16.47.02” is now full with 106 m4a audio files, 9 Jpg (those work fine!), 135 3g2 video files, 124 3gp video files, 166 m4v video files, 124 mov video files, 166 mp4 video files. All of them taking up 149GB (my SD card is only 32GB!). How do I identify which of these files can be recovered?

My camera is a Sanyo HD1000 which records 720p 30fps mp4 files using the H264 format.

I’m now trying a scan 40-minute scan of the SD card using GetDataBack for FAT from http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm (I don’t know if it also is some trialware thing).

It might have happened as the battery on the camera ran out while recording a video. Or it may be due to using a cheap 1rmb SD card adapter that I bought in Shenzhen onto the media-rooms secured Windows desktop. Or I may have shaken the camera around too much, or the Patriot cards (that I think I bought at Fry’s Electronics in Las Vegas about a year ago).

Thanks for your help if you know how to recover this card!