Blue is dead...

We had a perfect tether flight on Saturday, followed by a bad free flight.
The vehicle started well, but as airspeed built up it started to spin.
It got to about 1Kft then started down. It went unstable probably due to the high rate of spin.
and started to leave the area of the pad and was heading toward the spectator area so I aborted. Both the software driven and RC only vent abort worked.
The vehicle is totaled.

The micro sd flash chip from the vehicle physically looks ok, but gets very warm when power is applied so I've gotten no data from the vehicle.

I had a camera pointed at the bottom of the motor with a good view of the vanes and if I can recover data from the video camera SD card it should provide some information.
The camera was destroyed on impact, the SD card is fine but the camera did not close the video file before impact. So it shows zero length.

Any advice on how to fix this?
My approach:
I've got some utilities for manipulating bare SD sectors that I use for my data logging cards.
Using this I wrote a utility to copy all the sectors off the Cameras SD card into a big file.
So the original card is safe and I won't mess with that.
I then wrote a short utility to copy the exact same sectors contents back onto a equal sized SD card. I'll then run chkdsk on this duplicate SD card.

One rub is that while the SD cards are the same brand and size they report slightly different numbers of physical sectors, will this mess up the FAT table accounting? The card I'm copying to has more sectors than the one off the camera.

The cards is formatted as FAT16 so I can start tracing clusters by hand and reassembling file chains, but its been along time since I did FAT table stuff by hand with a hex editor.
Any recommendations on good tools to do this?


If that does not work,
any other ideas on recovering the video data from the SD card?