I got a frantic message from my daughter Saturday morning. Seems she was shooting photos all day on Friday and when inserting the SD card from her camera into her computer (and another computer, and then her camera again) it would not mount. She did note that it was a little “damaged” on the corner…
The photo above shows some of the carnage that ensued. She brought the card to me, and I told her I’ve read that you can cut the card in half, remove the “chip” and insert it into a new card. I first cut in half a micro SD card adapter (since I have a lot of them) but that was no good. It’s internal design didn’t match up. No loss. Then I tried the card that came with my 3D printer, since it was only 4GB, and that did not work… I eventually told her that she might have to purchase an exact match so the chip would fit right…
She headed out to the store, found one, brought it to me, and five minutes later, Bob was your uncle. Meaning… it worked! I did warn her to just copy all files off it, and not to rely on it for the future. (She also bought a new SD card to replace it.) So now I had two of the “chips” from SD cards with no cases…
What else to do but 3D print replacements! I found a few models, and chose this Replacement SD Card Case to print. It printed pretty quickly, since it’s small and flat.
I ended up using a bit of super glue to hold the chip in place, and then adding electrical tape to it to shim it a bit so it would fit right into the SD card slot…
It sort of works… in some SD readers, but not all. That said, I’d recommend this fix for rescue, but I’m not sure I’d call the card reliable for everyday use. For instance, I’d prefer to not have it fail physically in my laptop, but in an external card reader I could tear apart if needed, I’ll use it. It seems to work fine in my Nikon camera, but not in my 3D printer, so… hit and miss.
If you go this route it might work, it might not… maybe there’s a better 3D model to use, I don’t know, and I super glued mine in place, which means I’ll wait until the next SD card failure.
1 reply on “SD Card Rescue Mission”
Cool! I’ll have to try this. I have a bad 64 GB card from my camera – the shell split open and the lock tab disappeared. Without the lock tab, readers don’t see the card. I faked it with a drop of hot-melt glue where the lock tab used to be and it works, but I have no idea how long it will last.