HELP!! Digital Camera xD card seems corrupted.
 

I have an Olympus SP-350 DC with a 1GB xD storage card. Yesterday, I tried to transfer the images to my Laptop, and used a digital card reader.
The first attempt resulted in me being able to view the images, altho they were in a subfolder that I don't recall having made myself. I was for some reason unable to make an actual transfer to the Laptop, so decided to use the camera to laptop cable.

Here's where the problem comes in: When connected to the camera, the xD card ONLY shows a subfolder "DCIM", which I assume is internal memory. It does NOT have any of the other subfolders where the pictures (If not now corrupt) reside. I can't find the pics at all......:(

Any thoughts as to whether I've actually destroyed my vacation pictures, or have simply put them on the card somewhere where I can't find them??

The really funny thing is that when I put the xD card back in the camera, it still shows the same "number" of remaining pics as it did when I took it out. Seems to me that if I'd actually ERASED them, it would reset the number....
Can anyone help?? Thanks much in advance and Best, Dave

Sorry I can't help, but I recently bought a 1GB Kingston SD card in HKG and I can't seem to get any device or computer to access it. :(

When the card is in the camera (and not connected to the laptop) can you view the images in playback mode? If you can view the images on the camera's screen, then they're not gone. They are there somewhere on the card. If, however, you can't get any images to come up in playback ... well, gee ... I'm sorry....

Maybe somebody here has the answer on how to recover deleted images.

There should be a 100OLYMP folder inside the DCIM folder. The images should be in the 100OLYMP folder. Guessing only a little bit here since I use Canon equipment.

If the images are not viewable either in the card reader or in the camera review mode, you will have to use data recovery software to look deeper into the problem.

The SD card is just a disk drive to the computer, so any software used to recover files from a hard drive can be used to probe the SD card.

I have Norton software from work, but a Google search turned up this list of free recovery tools from PC World.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/col...ads/files.html

Give one, or all, of these a try and see what you can find.

Thanks a bunch birdstrike - There is a 100OLYMP folder also in the card, altho no images are viewable from it - either thru the camera or the laptop. I will check into the software recovery since I still feel (based on the picture count) that they are not 'erased'.

Many thanks! Best, Dave

I bought a 2GB Kingston SD card in main land China -- maybe Guilin -- and it works like a charm. Did this about a month ago and did not realize how fast prices were falling. I paid about $34 USD and can now buy 2GB cards here for that.

Though this won't help, I appreciate your post.

I've always just let the cards fill up with hundreds of pix, and though I've never had a problem, I'm going to be sure to get them off of there a lot sooner.

Thx.

Stop taking pictures of Britney Spears getting out of limos. That will corrupt any camera. :p

This has happened to me before... I use a program called photorescue to recover my photos. One neat benefit, it also allows you to recover photos you may have deleted :)

This also looks promising. . .

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm

My thanks to everyone for their offers of help, websites, and generally sympathetic responses!! Here's what I've decided to do:
The local camera store has a Manufacturer's recovery utility that I hope will work. If successful, I'll gladly pay them the $25, If not - then I'm just SOL. They seem to think, however, that the card showing continued 'limited capacity' is a good thing, and they feel it may have to do with corrupted directories, which they should be able to fix.

I'll follow up with the answers. Wish me luck. :)

Best, Dave

Check out jufsoft's Bad Copy pro. The demo copy will ascertain if there is any data to recover.

I've had excellent results from the software at objectrescue.com.

I also format the cards between each use now and haven't had a problem since.