Please help photo recovery CF card

Using PhotoRec to recover lost data
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Sytse
Posts: 1
Joined: 27 Mar 2013, 14:44

Please help photo recovery CF card

#1 Post by Sytse »

Hello and thank you very much in advance for any help you can give me. Also, Christophe Grenier, thank you very much for creating, sharing and supporting your fantastic recovery software! :mrgreen:

Now, here's my problem. I had used the same 8 GB SanDisk Ultra CF card in my Nikon D200 for a very long time without any problems. However, when visiting a friend and reviewing my photo's on her MacBook Pro things went awry.
After viewing the photo's I chose to "eject" the USB cardreader drive. I disconnected the card reader from the USB port and immediately I got an error that a device was disconnected improperly (I did some research and this seams to be a known problem with snow leopard / mountain lion / whatever...). I just ignored this message and put the card back into my camera. It still was working fine. I could take new photo's and review them on the camera display. The photo's I had already taken before where also still on the card.

However, when I got back to my friend and put the card in the cardreader which I then connected to the USB port, I got the message that the card was removed incorrectly the previous time and the card was now unreadable. I tried to play around with the options a litle, but there was nothing I could do (I might have pressed "Initialize", I don't remember... this was a while ago. I didn't know that "initialize" is really format :oops: ). When I tried to put the card back in the camera I got an error message that the card was not readable!

I tried several recovery softwares, but I didn't get lucky so far. When I connect the card to my windows PC (via the same USB card reader) it takes very long to load the card and the computer freezes for several minutes (it's pretty old.. :P ). I tried some things with Test Disk and PhotoRec, but, sadly, I haven't managed to recover a single photo. It looks like the whole partition is lost.

The strange thing is, the first time I tried PhotoRec it did start recovering files, but I aborted the process because it would take a long time and I wanted to do it another time. But when I retried it didn't work.

After this, I gave up for a while. I asked some questions at another forum, but nobody could help me. I got a new card and just shot photo's on that one. Anyway, I would really like to give it another go. I'm sure some of the photo's are still somewhere on the faulty card, waiting to be recovered... :lol:
I thought about posting here before, but I just didn't get around to it. I think I remember being requiered to post some specific details, and maybe a log file to get help...? I can't seem to find that info now. What I can find is a very large text file in the testdisk directory (6,41 GB) which is called "testdisk". I'm not realy sure where that came from...
Anyway, if you need more information, please just ask and I'll do my best to supply all the specifics.

Again, thanks very much in advance for any help. I would be very happy if I could recover just some of the photo's and be able to use the card again.

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cgrenier
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Re: Please help photo recovery CF card

#2 Post by cgrenier »

Run PhotoRec, after selecting the memory card, does it see your partition ? Choose [Whole] instead of [Free] when asked. Are there read errors ?

UliS
Posts: 2
Joined: 10 Aug 2013, 12:53

Re: Please help photo recovery CF card

#3 Post by UliS »

I would have lost half of my vacation photos if it wouldn’t have been for Recoverfab, who were able to retrieve them from a faulty compact flash card. One of my cf cards caused an error message in my camera and became unreadable by the card reader, too. All other cf cards worked fine however, the one with all the photos from Italy just couldn’t be recognized by the computer. I did an internet query only to discover that most data recovery products are software applications, but my card problem seemed to be a more complex issue. It looked like I had to accept that these vacation photos would only be stored as ‘mental’ images, when I ran across http://recoverfab.com . Recoverfab opens the faulty device, retrieves its memory via a detour avoiding the damaged control circuit and voila: All your photos are at your disposal. Check out their website and watch the posted videos about this process. Pretty impressive! I first read about them while still traveling in Germany (I was literally only 2 hours away from them), but thought clearly there has to be a company like this in the USA. Nope, there’s not!!! After I’d returned to the States, I contacted Leopold Hiersche from Recoverfab, mailed my damaged device on 8/2/2013 and had access to my photos by 8/9/2013! Recoverfab’s service is not free, but definitely worth the money.

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