This caused Windows to give the “This disk needs formatting to be used” message, to my horror. This 8GB card was out of my phone and had around 6GB of photos and videos on it.

After a while of searching for ways to recover the files I found a few methods which had no avail. I even tried booting into a live linux distro (Debian of course) to try some linux tools.
Things were looking grim, at least until I found a mention of R-Studio.

After a few minutes of scanning and recovering I had 100% of all my photos and videos back and 90% of everything else. Thanks to R-Studio nothing that I didn’t have a copy of was lost. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation I highly recommend R-Studio for recovery, it works and works well.

Lesson learnt and I now only use blank SD cards for testing, rather than the ones I use on a daily basis for other purposes.