Travel Technology - Corrupted Photos

I got back from New York on Wed. and started going through my digital photos. I worked both at home on my Windows XP and at school on my Mac OS X G4 off of a 1GB Lexar SD card in Photoshop 7.0. Everything was fine until this morning, when I noticed that about ten of the photos were corrupt. That is, the image was truncated about halfway down and the remaining space was solid orange (the color of Christo's gates) or some other color. Sometimes part of the image would be repeated.

I quickly downloaded all of thie images to the harddrive (something I should have done when I got home immediately). About 10 hours later (now) I went through the images again that were on the SD card. Now 70 of the images are corrupt. Some are truncated as described above (although some are truncated higher up, leaving only a quarter or a thin band of pixels). Others come up with errors when opened in photoshop, listed below

-Could not open [file] because reading arithmetic coded JPEG files is not implimented.
-Could not open [file] because an unknown or invalid JPEG marker type is found. (This one occurs the most!)
-Could not open [file] because an invalid SOS, DHT, DQT, or EOI JPEG marker is found before a JPEG SOI marker.

The computers at school are scanned every morning for viruses. I'm scanning my home computer now, and haven't found any viruses. I'm scared that the rest of my pictures will all disentigrate... does anyone know what causes this and how to prevent it? One note, I have a tendency to just pull the card out of my PC without going to the "remove hardware safely" dialog box, although I only do so after the light is no longer lit on the card reader. Are my photos on my hard drive at risk? Are other file types more stable (like TIFF)?

One PSD I had on the card as well was corrupted, it took on a red-tint. Could the problem be from writing and reading to the card too much instead of just using it to write photos and then read in bulk (download) once?

Some specifics:
Media card
-1GB Lexar SD
Camera
-Minolta Z2
Computers
-Windows XP professional with an AMD Athalon processor (1.25 GHZ), 512 MB ram
-Mac OS X on a G4, don't know the details

Any help is appreciated! Thank you, Zach

The images you have copied to your hard drive are stable. They are now at no more risk than any other file on that system.

If you insert the SD card into your computer, right click on it in Windows Explorer, choose properties, tools, error checking, what does it say?

I would guess that the ten corrupt images may be lost, the rest are now safe, and the SD card is failing. You might reformat the card and not use it for critical work until it has proved reliable over some period of time.

If the "lost" images are important, they may well be possible to recover, but I could not say how without more research.

Based on the info provided, I would also agree that if you successfully downloaded the other files to a hard drive, they should be fine. It sounds like the SD Drive is failing (rare, but it does happen).

If photos are an important element of your job, then consider investing in a backup device you can carry on the road. Here is an example:
http://www.flash-memory-store.com/usb-x-drive-pro-vp300-20gb.html

One final thing. I know it won't help get the photos back, but Lexar SD cards come with a lifetime warranty. If the SD Card has indeed gone "bad", you should be able to get it replaced for free. See the Lexar web site for more information.

Michael
http://www.biztrip.com

Had the same thing happen once, the card failed you. I got the software from object rescue

www.ObjectRescue.com

and used that to recover all but one of the images. I believe they offer a 30 day trial that lets you know at least if you can recover the images, then it's $30 to keep the software. I bought it, but never needed it again after that one time, but to me it was more then worth it.

I now purchase multiple smaller cards insttead of large cards, just in case it happens again, that all your eggs in one basket thing.

Thanks for the advice. Birdstrike, I'll do what you suggested/asked and get back to you. For now I can say that the file system is corrupt, as the error checker found. The recovery program couldn't recover the files, unfortunately. I'm glad that my hard drive files are safe... thanks again, Zach