Best way to recover images from corrupt card?

[Jeff Lucia]

I bought a new ProSpec (Calumet) 8GB UDMA compact flash card yesterday and shot all day with it today. There were a few times when it seemed like the camera was taking longer than usual to write to the card, but that may have been my imagination. Then I noticed on reviewing images that one was completely gray, and I shrugged that off. Later, every 10th image or so came up with a notice I've never seen: "Unable to view image." I turned the camera off and put it down for about 5 minutes. Then I shot two more images.


When I got home, there were only two images on the card: the last two I had shot.


The first card I used (a SanDisk Extreme IV that I've used for a couple of years) seems fine...so I figure the problem is just a bad card. However, there were some fantastic images on it, and I can't recreate the event (baseball game) and I would really, really like to recover the images.


I tried software called Photorescue and it didn't even find the two images. Simply looking in the finder window on my computer, with the card connected via USB reader, shows tons of files with all sorts of unintelligible names.


Can anyone help?


Thanks


Jeff

[Jeff Lucia]

Finally! I tried Klix:


www.joesoft.com


and it worked like a charm. A very slow charm -- several hours to recover 6.5 GB of RAW images -- but a charm nonetheless. It was $30 to download and worth it....easy to use and it shows you the images it can recover in demo mode before you have to buy a serial number, after which you can recover them.


Hope this helps somebody.


Jeff

[Brendan7]

I will make a note of this software Jeff, thanks for posting. Maybe you could post a couple of the images you recovered?


brendan

[neuroanatomist]

Thanks for the software tip, Jeff! Glad you got your pics back.

I bought a new ProSpec (Calumet) 8GB UDMA compact flash card yesterday and shot all day with it today...When I got home, there were only two images on the card.

The first card I used (a SanDisk Extreme IV that I've used for a couple of years) seems fine.

IMO, the take home message here is to stick with cards from SanDisk or Lexar. Even then, always format and test out a new card before relying on it for important shots!


--John

[cfnz]

Even then, always format and test out a new card before relying on it for important shots!

Absolutely, the first SanDisk card I ever bought failed on me the first time I used it.

[Tabazan]

Hello,


My new Sandisk Extreme Pro 32Gb get stuck ("Card unreadable by the 7D, pls format" ... ) after I took 1000 pictures during a sport event. It was the first time I used it and wondered how such (quite) expensive card could fail so soon. Once again, it's just electronic stuff, but it's frightening.


Back home, got the card on my PC, launched Rescue Pro, which scanned it, worked on it all night.


All pics were recovered in the morning.


It's no advertisement, as it works free. I've downloaded various programs to do the job, and Rescue pro was the first I used.

[neuroanatomist]

after I took 1000 pictures during a sport event. It was the first time I used it and wondered how such (quite) expensive card could fail so soon.

As I stated above,always format and testa new card before relying on it for important shots!


Glad you got your shots back, though!

[Tabazan]

always format and test

Yes, I did format it on the 7D but had no time to test it on its full 16Gb capability.


(out of topic) Funnily enough it happens just after the two of three runs of the skiers. That means there was only one run left, and then the fog... was threatening and the 3rd run had maybe to be cancelled. It all went fine after all, they did the 3rd run and my old Extreme III did not too bad with the speedy FPS of the 7D :-(


Back to the Sandisk Pro, the strangest thing is that, it's a 16Gb card, files were in Jpeg (high) and there were counted 1350 on the card (number retrieved by the rescue software) , without the 7D counter getting below 500 remaining pics during the shooting.


What's more, the software used for rescuing files was showing (just like in a defrag software map) that half of the card was empty... ?!?


Finally, does this may have to do with low temperatures (we were at 3200 meters) ??


A final word : the 7D is a marvellous camera for sports (tracking is superb), and I was impressed also by the Sigma 120-400 which AF was flawless.


Thanks