Doppy

I bought a new 16GB Transcend SDHC card, put it in my old Nikon Coolpix L3 and took a number of pictures on a recent trip. Yesterday I stuck it into the SD card slot on my Windows 7 laptop and was able to browse the pictures without a problem. I rotated some of them using the default photo viewer, and it said "saving" when moving to the next picture in the slideshow.

At the end of the day I pulled the card out of the slot. Today when I put it back in the computer, it says the card isn't formatted. The camera says the same thing.

Is there any chance that I could use some kind of recovery tools to get the pictures back?

YVR Cockroach

Try badcopy. The trial ware will let you know if the data is recoverable.

Mabuk dan gila

For photo recovery this one is powerful, open source, free and gets results if you can read instructions. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

If you want so user friendly your mom could use it, don't like reading instructions, and don't mind paying $40 this one http://www.cardrecovery.com/ is easy to use, powerful and gets results.

Either program will pretty much be able to recover any pictures that are at all possible to recover.

If you are only trying to recover pictures stick to those. For more comprehensive data recovery beyond just pictures, http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk is a very powerful open source tool (for people who can read instructions)

Doppy

Thanks for the quick suggestions. I used PhotoRec and it worked perfectly - I got everything back! Easy to use, to boot.

I knew I was taking a chance using a SD card with a bigger capacity than this old camera could hold; guess I (almost) learned my lesson.

cordelli

Some previous threads that may help

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...ital-card.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...corrupted.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...d-cf-card.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...w-cf-card.html

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...ed-photos.html

Can't say all the software mentioned in those threads is still around, but it may help.

Going forward, I believe you should do nothing with anything on a photocard with a PC but read the images. Every time I've had trouble with a camera card, it's been after I've written to it from a PC or deleted files, etc. Eventually I learned to stop doing it.

Years ago (2004 or so) I used Media Rescue Pro from these guys - http://www.essentialdatatools.com/pr...ediarescuepro/

but have not used it since. I have version 1.6 installed, they have released version 6.0, so I really can't speak to their current products. It's free to see if you can recover anything, $30 to buy the software to actually recover the images.

gfunkdave

Another thing is that when using a memory card in a computer, always be sure to do the Safely Remove Hardware procedure before taking the card out. This will help avoid data loss.

Taltos

Plus, never format the card in the PC always in the camera.

benjaminwp

Try this program, www.piriform.com/recuva I find it very easy to use, good, and fast too.

Btw, afaik on newer computers, you do not have to "safely remove" the cards.

Spunwasi

Disc drill is free, for OSX and it's worked for me every time.

fuzz

Here's the problem: I have a USB flash drive that I have been using daly for a couple of years. Yes, the connector has bent on occasion (not severely). A few weeks ago, all was fine. When I went to work after the weekend, my PC said it might be Mac formatted. I tried a few computers at work and got e same message. When I tried at home on my old MacBook the error was that it might need to be reformatted.

Now, I get the power light but it will not mount, either on Mac or PC.

I have one Excel file that is the most important that I would like back, though I would like everything back.

I called a place I saw online. Www.dataretrieval.com. Has anyone used them? Drive savers quoted between 500-3000 dollars and told me to expect near 2000 dollars. That's not worth it to me.

It's a 16 GB flash drive. The pictures and most of the other things are backed up. The Excel file I have data until mid September, so it's not the end of the world, but I would appreciate recovering the data.

Help! And happy holidays to all.

Fuzz

Middle_Seat

Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I never have problems reading, deleting photos and removing SDHC cards from my computer.

I do not do the "safely remove" procedure, just close the window showing the files and then pull out the card.

The one safe thing I do is to only format the cards in the camera, not in the computer.

Braindrain

Supposedly, the PC (Mac or Windows) doesn't format a SD card properly. To get around that problem, you can use the Panasonic SD Formatter (a free program - just search for it). The incorrect formatting by PC was the source of a lot of corrupted SD cards.

Now, this was a few years ago and I have no idea if current OS have fixed that problem.

chgoeditor

I'm so glad that the whole wide world doesn't know that you can recover data from an SD card. Last year I got kicked out of a Prince aftershow at 4am during the third or fourth encore because I snapped a few pictures (discreetly...yes, I knew Prince bans photographs whenever possible at shows, but heck, I was 12 feet from the stage in a venue that holds 300 and couldn't resist, and most of the crowd was taking pics). The bouncers watched while making me delete the pictures on my camera. I had them back within an hour.