Hi
@AnnaZ,
If your SD card is reading in the camera, then the easiest option is to connect the camera to the computer with a USB cable (an appropriate one probably came with the camera).
Most of the time the computer will automatically detect the camera as a USB storage device and it will show up in "My Computer" as either the camera name (i.e. CANON) or it might show up as another drive letter (i.e. E:\ or F:\ - assuming C:\ is your Windows installation and D:\ is your CD/DVD drive). You should be able to open this as a folder and in it there is typically a DCIM folder (sometimes with subfolders) that contains the photos on the card.
The fact that Windows is telling you the card needs to be formatted when you try to read it through your SD card reader suggests that the file system has been corrupted/damaged somehow on the card. Don't format it if you don't want to lose the photos. As for formatting twice, I strongly recommend not doing this. Once should be sufficient. An SD card is flash memory and it has a finite life (usually something like 1,000,000 writes). Each time you format it, it uses up a write cycle for the entire card. If you use your camera a lot, then reducing wear-and-tear on the SD card is a good idea.
If you can recover the photos from the card, you can try formatting it and reusing it. But I would be skeptical about using the card again after getting a warning like that without knowing exactly what caused it (diagnostics sometimes show up a read/write error in the SD card, which means the card has been permanently damaged). Given how cheap SD cards are these days, I would recommend getting a new one.
I hope that helps.
Hi
@pirl,
Feel free to send me a treemail if you'd like to discuss your external HDD problem in detail.
Kind Regards,
Joshua.
