[Gamoe]

Not sure if this belongs in the peripherals forum or the Mac OS forum. I just picked one. Mods, you decided if it's otherwise.

So I'm helping someone who wants to put up a website and he tells me that he wants to put some pictures in his digital camera on the site. So, I pull out my old Sandisk multi-card reader, pop in the camera's SD card and look around to see which picture is which. I get very strange file names and characters connected to no apparent file icon. So I copy over all the card's contents to my iBook, so as not to have to touch the card again. Still, I can't open any picture and they all appear to be corrupted, although they were visible within the camera.

So I give back the card, this guy puts it back into his camera and suddenly we're faced with a "No images on card" message. Needless to say, it wasn't my proudest moment and I have no idea how the card could have suddenly been corrupted just by connecting it to the iBook and copying over files. I went home with the card in the hopes of retrieving the photos somehow, but I've gotten nowhere. I just don't understand exactly what or how this happened. And I cannot accept that all those pictures are just gone, after a simple, routine operation.

The camera is a Photosmart 435, and I'm running the latest system version (10.4.6). I'm sure some more info might be helpful, but I don't know what-- It's just a normal card. I think Disk utility reported it as being formatted in FAT12 format. Is there some kind of compatibility problem here? I even tried to mount it on my Ubuntu system, but got nowhere there too. I don't have a Windoze system available. Any help is appreciated. I am thoroughly embarrassed about this situation. I was trying to help the guy put up some pictures he really liked, and I end up making the card unreadable. I just really don't understand what went wrong. Any ideas?

[tooki]

(This is clearly not a discussion of Mac OS X, which is the sole purpose of the Mac OS X forum.)

That seems very weird, but it certainly seems like a corrupted card.

There are a number of commercial and shareware programs out there for rescuing photos from memory cards, including Lexar Image Rescue, MediaRecover, ImageRecall, and Prosoft DataRescue.

Surely one of those can do the job.

tooki

[Gamoe]

Originally Posted by tooki

(This is clearly not a discussion of Mac OS X, which is the sole purpose of the Mac OS X forum.)

Well, if it was Mac OS X which corrupted the card, then it would be related, which is why I was unsure.

But anyway, incredibly I was able to recover all of the pictures! If you're curious, I used the open-source software PhotoRec.

In a last-ditch effort, I reformatted the card, and were able to recover all the files after formatting. Prior to that, I was unable to recover many files. It seems the re-formatting fixed whatever corruption occurred and allowed the file recovery. Next time I'm locking the card, though.