file system data type

[John F. Eldredge]

I have an SD card that I am trying to retrieve data from, so far
unsuccessfully. If the lsblk command simply lists a file system type on
an SD card as "data", does that mean it has failed to identify the
contents as anything else?

[Jean-Pierre White]

I have started to use AI to help with troubleshooting technical issues outside of my experience. I cross verify advice between AI agents for anything that could be destructive. You can have a healthy dialog without the usual hazing on Reddit or other social media groups.

I use Gemini, Copilot and ChatGPT

[Ryan Marina]

I don't know what invokation of lsblk you're using. When I run lsblk on my machine, I get
something like this:
ham:~$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1 259:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 1G 0 part /boot
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 228.7G 0 part /nix/store
│ /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 8.8G 0 part [SWAP]

Not seeing any 'data' parts in the TYPE column, there. If I run `lsblk -f` (to show
filesystem information):
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat FAT32 87C7-181E 768.7M 25% /boot
├─nvme0n1p2 ext4 1.0 7ec00b9f-e09d-4c0d-af55-34b2f412e3bf 71.4G 63% /nix/store
│ /
└─nvme0n1p3 swap 1 swap 0d462dac-ca81-4f49-a1f9-d9c1b0f3323c [SWAP]

I'm seeing filesystem designations in the FSTYPE column. My intuition would indicate that
if you're just seeing 'data' in the FSTYPE column, there's not a filesystem that lsblk
could recognize. Can you give us more information about your card? Dump the first sector
or so to see what filesystem headers there are, if any?

In the mean time, you can make a full disk backup with dd so you can format the card and use
it in other capacities. In order to do that, you'd probably do something like this:

sudo dd if=/dev/your_sd_card_here of=./your_sd_card.img bs=1M

Make sure that you have enough storage space on the medium holding that disk image backup.

Hope this helps,
Ryan
https://beepboop.systems

[Kent Perrier]

can you use dd to make an image of the sd card, cp to a backup file and then work with the image?

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[Michael L]

Have you tried a USB SD Card adapter? .. From 9-29-25:

I had a perfectly good SD card not load on Windows 11 saying it needed to be formatted.  Using the USB SD adapter, Windows recognized it no problem.  The USB SD adapter also worked better on Fedora Linux than the SD card by itself.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nlug-talk/CA%2B6_KC-jo5qceNqSKSpgKN2J3_BjYYv1FvyR2eCnEBJmss%3Dk7g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Michael L]

This USB adapter made a problematic SDcard no problem