One of our crew has some very important pictures on one of these cards who was using it in a card reader and now for some reason or other its become un-readable by the card reader and camera.
I see that there are some packages of software that claim to recover these. This however doesn't seem like just deleted files more like the card or camera cannot read the card.
Anyone have any practical experience of this sort of thing with these cards at all and can recommend a software package, free or paid for ?..
And yes the person concerned has been given a lecture on data backup but all that resulted in was a flood of tears;!..
If you get an XD->SD adapter then try it in a laptop with an SD card slot. I had an unreadable card in an Android phone, when put directly in the SD slot Win 7 64bit managed to read the card and fix the file system OK. Didn't seem to lose much.
If more mangled than that, I don't know, there has to be a minimum amount of stuff to allow the card's internal controller to give a recognisable signature to the file system software.
Also, possibly a Linux machine could allow a dd command to run on the SD reader device and hence do a sector by sector copy to disk?
I've had problems with one make of camera using a non-standard file system on the card, which can only be read in the camera, and the data only passed to the maker's interface program. The card was unreadable in both a card reader and a different make of camera.
OTOH, if it has worked in the past, and now won't, I use this program:-
formatting link
a fair degree of success. Free, slow and thorough.
- it has worked well for me in the past, and it's big brother
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will recover amazing amounts from defective hard drives. Free download, easy install, friendly interface (no conflict of interest to declare, I'm just a fan)
I've had good results with Stellar recover software
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- with several flash cards, USB sticks and hard drives over the years. I believe the free version will analyse the drive (card in this case) and show you what's recoverable, but you need to purchase it to actually recover the data.
I cant remember the nam (wish I could) but I used a free download to retrieve a corrupted card and it recovered most of them including some I had deleted a good while back. No harm in downloading a couple and trying them.
The first thing you do is put it in a suitable adapter in a Linux machine and use dd to make a back-up image of the card contents. That way if you make it worse, you can always restore to your starting point. (There might be a Windows equivalent but I don't know it.)
I've had one corrupt itself before I had chance to get it home and back it up, so it's not always possible. However, my normal procedure is to copy everything off the card and then copy all the files to two more hard disks on separate machines, so I get three permanent copies. Then there's the backups of those machines...
Check CNET - they have a download for ArtPlus digital recovery. I had an older version but ended up not using it, though the interface was simple. Don't know about the new version.
There are others there that claim to do the trick as well.
How do flash characteristics compare to the hard drive ?
I understand a hard drive will try to read a 512 byte sector, for up to 15 seconds. Using tools like "ddrescue" is to circumvent the long copy times that might result from using "dd".
But how does flash work ? Does it bog down for 15 seconds ? Does it read an entire 128K or 256K block and just give a CRC error with it ? Presumably there are some differences, between how flash works, and how a hard drive works.
The flash device can be trashed, if the critical data it keeps, such as size or flash chip type, gets corrupted. That would likely result in the device not responding at all. In which case, dd isn't going to work. (A data recovery expert can hook up to the flash chip directly, and get the data off it. But that costs $$$.)
A hard drive is similar, in that the hard drive keeps critical data below track 0, and loads that data at startup. I've had a drive fail while running, and the controller lost its identity and reported in Windows that it was "Falcon". The drive capacity declaration was wrong as well... And of course, all my data was gone and the drive didn't respond at all when powered up later. Before it said it was "Falcon", I got clicks of death.
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a "dd --list" on the PC with the flash device connected, and if it doesn't get listed, then it could well be broken. I identify which drive is which, by their declared sizes. For example, with my 8GB USB2 flash stick plugged in, I see an 8GB entry.
Thanks to all who replied. We have downloaded 4 types of recommended software but it is totally un-recoverable In Fact Two versions wouldn't "see" the card at all in a USB reader so we've given up.
In fact said person was trying to copy the card to backup but in the removing of the card from the Camera to the reader that it seems was where the fault developed.
I hear that these cards which it seems are now obsolete were a bit problematic in that area...
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