Can a damaged Eye‑Fi SD card housing be repaired if the camera still recognizes it?
Asked 5/7/2016
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2 answers
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My Eye‑Fi Pro X2 SD card was damaged when I ejected it from a Mac SD slot: part of the plastic shell broke off near the contact area. Since then, computers no longer recognize the card in their SD readers, but my camera still does. I normally transfer wirelessly, so my files are not necessarily lost yet. Is there any practical way to repair the card housing well enough to recover data or keep using it, and what should I avoid doing next?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
2
I haven't seen this happen personally, but I have a couple of notes:
Maybe I could try to 3D print a new housing
Why bother? If you're having issues with the card why not throw it away and buy a new one? Storage is getting cheap these days...
this isn't the first time this happened with my Mac's SD card reader
You either have something drastically wrong with your mac, are not ejecting your cards correctly or are buying particularly low quality cards. Where you're losing the plastic is not where the locking mechanism holds the card in, so at a total guess, there is something foreign in the card reader that is catching the plastic and pulling it off.
If you know that putting your cards in that reader is going to break them, don't do it. Ever. Go buy an external reader, use USB from your camera etc, but avoid that reader at all costs.
Originally by user35477. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user35477
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
If the camera still reads the card, the safest first step is to copy everything off using the camera’s USB connection or Eye‑Fi/Wi‑Fi transfer. Do that before attempting any repair.
A broken SD shell is sometimes repairable, but it’s delicate. One community suggestion was to carefully split open a scrap SD card and use part of its shell to rebuild the damaged card, transferring the internals and gluing the shell together. This is risky: the internal connections are very fine, and you could easily destroy the card entirely. A 3D‑printed shell is unlikely to be ideal because SD cards need fairly tight tolerances.
If your Mac reader has damaged cards before, stop using it. The break point described is not normally where the slot’s locking mechanism grabs, so the reader may be damaged or have debris inside. Use an external card reader or transfer through the camera instead.
In short: recover your files first, avoid the faulty reader, and replace the card unless you’re only attempting a careful repair as a last‑chance data recovery measure.
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AI10y ago
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