How to Recover Data from Formatted CF Card Error

CF card format error happens mainly because of card system physical damage/corruption, improper formatting, virus infection or other reasons. Sometimes you can’t even format the card. When you get “SD card is not formatted, do you want to format it now” error, you might be worried about losing all files on the CF card because you can no longer access them. But that’s not actually the truth.

No matter you decide to format it or not, you’re likely to recover data after CF card format error with a CF card recovery software as long as you haven’t put any new data to your CF card. Files on your SD card are just marked as inaccessible data and you can easily recover them with a CF card recovery software like Wondershare Data Recovery, or Wondershare Data Recovery for Mac. This program can perfectly fix your CF card not formatted error and restore all data on it as original. It enables you to recover all kinds of files after SD card not formatted error, including images, audio files, videos, document files, etc.

You can download a trial version of the CF card recovery software to fix SD card format error now.

Part 1Recover Data from Formatted CF Card Error

Note: When encountering SD card not formatted error, the best way to keep all data safe is to stop doing anything on the card, though you can still recover data even if you decide to format the card. If you keep using card after knowing about the error, the lost data can be easily overwritten by new data on your card,making data unrecoverable.

Step 1: Select a file type

To recover data from formatted SD card, you can go to select the specific file type or select the "All File Type" to start.

Step 2: Scan your CF card to look for files on it

The CF card recovery program will show the drive letter of your SD card in the window, and you can select it and click "Start" to allow the program scan files on it.

If you have already formatted the card, you can go to deep scan if quick scan can't find your lost data..

Step 3: Recover files after SD card format error

When the scanning is over, found files on your format error SD card will be displayed in "File View" and "Tree Virw" categories in the window.

Please view file names or preview photos/documents to check how many of files on your format error SD card can be recovered.

Finally, you can mark files and click "Recover" to fix SD card not formatted error and save them to your computer.