SD cards and microSD adapters are fragile links in the chain. A worn spring contact, a power-hungry reader on a passive hub, or a flaky extension cable can make a scan “freeze” or vanish mid-run even when the card itself is fine.
Prefer a short cable, a powered hub only when you trust it, or a rear motherboard port. If Windows offers to “scan and fix” the volume before you recover, read the dialog carefully; some repair paths write a new file system structure and can complicate undelete.
Label your cards and readers if you swap gear often. Mixing up two identical-looking USB sticks is a common way to scan the wrong volume and then wonder why “nothing came back.”
Workflow tips
- Eject properly after recovery; pulling power mid-write risks a second round of damage.
- Save recovered files to the PC’s internal disk or a different USB stick, not back onto the suspect card.
- If the phone is the only reader, MTP-only phones are a poor match for classic desktop recovery; a card in a USB reader is the straightforward path.
Hardware oddities are collected on Fixes.