Digital camera accessories

[shiv21]

Hi Everyone,

I finally managed to format my memory card using my mums digital camera...so now my card is formatted and I am able to use it again.

The next step is for me to use the card reader and a photo recovery program to recover the formatted photos (my desperately needed holiday & birthday photographs).  I have tried many different programs which I have downloaded to my computer (Card Recovery, Flash recovery, PhotoOne Recovery etc etc).

Now heres my new problem....some of these seem to be working fine and are recovering 85-150 images...but roughly half way through the scan....it stops working...and as a result I cannot even save or view the recovered images.  Its as if the card reader suddenly thinks there is no card there (similar to the way it was before I formatted it). It seems as if there are some sort of 'bad sectors' in the memory card. Im not sure what this means or how to fix it.

Can anyone help at all? I just felt so close to getting my photos and now i feel like ill never get them back  

Siobhan x

[bdery]

Hi again,

it's good to hear that at least the card was formatted correctly, that's a start. However, since it still seems to fail, I would not trust it in the future.

If the problem you describe happens at the same time with every recovery program, I think you're correct to think that a sector (or sectors) is damaged, that's why I wouldn't trust the card in the future.

I know some recovery softwares write the files they find one at a time, during the recovery process. From memory, the one I used (PC Inspector) did this. So it could be a way to recover part of your data.

The last solution would be to contact the manufacturer of the card (especially if it's under warranty) and see what they can do. Let us know how it goes.

[shiv21]

Hi there,

Thanks for your reply I used a recovery software called "Card Recovery" this was very good as it managed to recover 84 of my 150 or so images which I was delighted with.  Although I am still extremely upset at the thought of not being able to recover the rest.

No matter what software I use, it always stops once it gets to the 84/85th image.  If there are bad sectors on the memory card - is there any way at all of fixing this? Or is there any way I can recover the rest of my images using a different kind of software?

I certainly plan to discard of this memory card once I've recovered all of my photos, I wont be trusting it again...but I am keeping it in the hope that I might be able to recover the rest of my photos.

Being able to recover the first 85 has given me a lot of hope, I just need some advice on where to go from here....?

Thank you x

[bdery]

Hi again,

good to hear that you recovered some pictures! That's a start.

I think we can safely say that your pictures #84-85 are goners... About the rest, the only solution I see (I don't know if it could be done) would be to find a way for the software to "start at the end" of the card (this sentence doesn't make much sense but I don't know how else to put it). I'm not sure it would even work, but there might be some programs that will allow you to do this. Or maybe you could tell the software to disregard some areas(the faulty ones). Then again, if those setors are damaged, it might be that everything "beyond" the sectors is damaged too.

You could try to fiddle a bit more with various programs, but considering you got more than half your pics back, I'd say you should consider it a victory, een if you recover nothing more.