r/datarecoverysoftware

Hi,

I had Home Assistant installed on an SD card and running on a raspberry pi4.since a while the card is not readable anymore so I could not join my server.

I found that the card it's corrupt, even though it's readable by the PC.

it's any way I can recover the backups done automatically in Home Assistant and saved on this SD card ?

I'm hoping someone with Android/MTP or data recovery experience can help.

Phone: Honor 200 Pro (internal storage)

PC: Windows 11

Transfer method: USB MTP (File Transfer mode)

What happened:

• I had 82 MP4 videos in: Internal shared storage/DCIM/
• All videos played normally on the phone.
• I selected all of them in Windows Explorer and used Ctrl+X (Cut).
• I pasted them onto my SSD.
• 63 videos transferred correctly.
• 19 videos became corrupted.
• The originals disappeared from the phone.

The corrupted files have very strange behavior:

• Explorer reports sizes around 46 GB (impossible; they should have been a few hundred MB each).
• "Size on disk" is only 8 KB.
• Copying the file tries to copy the full 46 GB.
• VLC cannot play them.
• FFmpeg reports:

​

moov atom not found
Invalid data found when processing input

What I've already checked:

• fsutil file queryextents
• certutil -dump
• certutil -hashfile
• HxD hex editor
• FFmpeg / FFprobe
• ADB

Findings:

• Beginning of the file is all 00.
• No ftyp.
• No mdat.
• No moov.
• I found stsc and co64 atoms near the end of the file.
• The co64 chunk offsets all point to locations that contain only 00.
• Searching for H.264/H.265 start codes found nothing.
• ADB confirms /sdcard/DCIM/ is now empty.
• find /sdcard -iname "*.mp4" returns nothing.

The phone has barely been used since this happened.

Question:

1. Does this look like a known MTP Cut/Move failure?
2. Is there any possibility the actual video data still exists on the phone even though the directory is empty?
3. Is there anything else I should try before sending the phone to a forensic recovery lab?

Any advice from people experienced with Android storage, MTP, or forensic recovery would be greatly appreciated.