CF memory card FAT disappeared; replaced with ancient one
Posted: 05 Dec 2012, 22:19
It would be great if TestDisk could deal with MBR issues like the following on memory cards/sticks as well as hard disks, but maybe that functionality isn’t available yet – TestDisk (both 6.13 and 6.14) seems to misreport the geometry of memory cards. My issue:
After successfully transferring files in this way a number of times before, a Lexar 64MB CF card inserted into a card reader displayed 2 folders and 1 file, total 512 bytes, instead of a number of folders/files totalling 42MB – which is still the amount of space reported in use on the drive. The three remaining items are all a couple of years old, so it seems like the MBR has become corrupt and an old backup has been dusted off.
TestDisk only sees a couple of deleted files – also from a couple of years ago – and these aren’t needed. What I would like to be able to do is restore the current contents (which include some data files I don’t think PhotoRec would find).
TestDisk gives the following warnings: Number of heads/cylinder mismatches 4 (FAT) != 255 (HD) and Number of sectors per track mismatches 32 (FAT) !=63 (HD). And it gives similar warnings with the working cards I tried, too – a 1GB SD and a 16MB XD. So I’m very wary of trying anything that might write to the card, such as Rebuild BS. It lists current partition structure as 1, P, FAT16, >32M, 0, 0, 33, 7, 206, 6, 125407, [NO NAME], and says ‘Warning: Bad ending cylinder (CHS and LBA don’t match), No partition is bootable’.
I ran Chkdsk without /F and it reported errors on one of the two folders currently visible. Also – rather ominously, as I thought it wasn’t supposed to make any changes without /F – it said ‘Removing trailing folder entries from \’. It offered to convert lost chains to files, which I didn’t do. It said doing so would add 46360576 bytes of free disk space. NB. I ran Chkdsk after TestDisk.
Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.
After successfully transferring files in this way a number of times before, a Lexar 64MB CF card inserted into a card reader displayed 2 folders and 1 file, total 512 bytes, instead of a number of folders/files totalling 42MB – which is still the amount of space reported in use on the drive. The three remaining items are all a couple of years old, so it seems like the MBR has become corrupt and an old backup has been dusted off.
TestDisk only sees a couple of deleted files – also from a couple of years ago – and these aren’t needed. What I would like to be able to do is restore the current contents (which include some data files I don’t think PhotoRec would find).
TestDisk gives the following warnings: Number of heads/cylinder mismatches 4 (FAT) != 255 (HD) and Number of sectors per track mismatches 32 (FAT) !=63 (HD). And it gives similar warnings with the working cards I tried, too – a 1GB SD and a 16MB XD. So I’m very wary of trying anything that might write to the card, such as Rebuild BS. It lists current partition structure as 1, P, FAT16, >32M, 0, 0, 33, 7, 206, 6, 125407, [NO NAME], and says ‘Warning: Bad ending cylinder (CHS and LBA don’t match), No partition is bootable’.
I ran Chkdsk without /F and it reported errors on one of the two folders currently visible. Also – rather ominously, as I thought it wasn’t supposed to make any changes without /F – it said ‘Removing trailing folder entries from \’. It offered to convert lost chains to files, which I didn’t do. It said doing so would add 46360576 bytes of free disk space. NB. I ran Chkdsk after TestDisk.
Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.