You always want to do the write protect because it is so easy for an OS, application, toolbar, virus, etc to write to the card (whether you know it or not). The best practice is to not even work with the original media. You take an image and work on that.
Have you deleted anything from the card since the previous format, before the accident? I always advise against that in normal workflow, since it can result in fragmentation that makes any subsequent recovery effort far more difficult. Basically, audio samples in the correct order vs. jumbled pieces to an audio puzzle.
If there have been no deletions, your audio should be in contiguous blocks. The fact that it is mono actually makes it a bit easier to restore.
PCM audio is a series of bits that are assembled to form a sample. Sometimes a sample is two 8 bit bytes, making a 16 bit sample. Other times it is 24 bits. If one bit, byte or "chunk" is missing, then portions of the subsequent audio often become jumbled noise. From that point forward, the only way to get "aligned" again is to get lucky, or fix it.
It's like if I gave you a list of 10 phone numbers, each 7 digits. You know that every 7 digits there is a new valid number you could dial. But if one digit was lost in the list, all of the subsequent numbers would be invalid. If you could find the missing digit and replace it with a number - any number - then the subsequent phone numbers would again be valid. The one sample would be wrong, but a one sample error is very easy to fix in audio.
If you capture and save a raw image of the card you could revisit this recovery project in the future.
Your audio is likely there and can be recovered via expertise and time.
Topic: Recover files after accidental format? (DR-680/user error) (Read 9499 times)