Photo Recovery…

Not much help at the moment but it’s worth doing a full format of your memory card after moving images onto your computer. Because memory cards use the same Fat16 or Fat32 that older versions of Windows use they have an area for marking bad sectors. When you do a full format (that takes about 30 seconds on a 4 gig card) the operating system will mark bad sectors and the camera will not attempt to write to them (I learnt this the hard way). Do this everytime you clear files off a card and you should get fair warning of impeding problems.

One thing that i have seen work…

CF cards use an IDE interface – a miniature version of the one found on hard drives. As with hard drives, if any one of the pin-connection holes should become obscured by dust or dirt, then you will get lots of read / write errors.

So – and here i suggest MUCH caution – if the card still fails to read, then try gently blowing the connector holes (with a puffer brush idealy) to make sure they are clear and if neccesary, VERY GENTLY tap the card over a solid surface connector side down.

use a puffer brush on the card interface inside the camera, too.

I have personally recoverd a lexar card this way, when Image Rescue said it was duff.

Hi APC,
Shouldn’t. I’m on a Mac, and I’ve downloaded and used Photorescue sucessfully, as recommended on here by Damien B earlier, with no probs. I’m running OS10.

Neat, sucessful prog. My card (A Fuji SD card) a year earlier had corrupted at Old Warden – it recovered all the pics fine, I reformatted the card, still going strong.

The previous thread: http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=47446

Cheers
James

Thanks for the replies chaps.

I’m in India at the moment – the card problem occurred while taking photos of the Taj Mahal of all things!

I’ll try the software option when I get back. I have a Mac, will that make any difference?

Thanks again.

Andy

When I had a totally duff card (see above), the actual cause was that I pulled the card out of the camera whilst it was still writing an image, in my haste to replace a full card and carry on shooting – easy mistake to make in one of those rush, rush lots of photo opportunities moments. This act on my part effectively *******ed up the file allocation table on the card, making it unreadable by any device whether camera or PC. The software that I recommend you try certainly cut through all of that and rescued everything on the card – even the half-written image that the camera was trying its damnedest to complete writing when I so rudely interupted its otherwise rather benevolent act!

Andy

I have had this and often it is 1 corrupt file that has got on there doing it. Ive even found a virus on a card before. I find it usefull to also defrag the card as well.

Photorescue on a PC, coupled with a PC card reader.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

Try the free demo first. If it works, all well and good, buy the software. If it doesn’t, what have you lost?

Worked for me – amazing bit of software that recovered all of my images from a card that neither the camera nor the PC would read.

Andy

PS: Having “rescued” the photos, it even allowed me to reformat the card and I am still happily using it without incident three years later.

Compact flash readers (that plug into computer USB sockets) are fairly cheap (I have 2 of them!)