cgsecurity.org

Hi guys,
I'm very confused and I hope someone can help. Just to give the background: I took 600+ photos in RAW format last week. When trying to download the photos off the camera, I was getting a "Card cannot be accessed" message on the screen. Fine, I thought I'd just pop the SD card directly into the slot on my MacBook Pro. The card pops up fine and I see the normal Canon and DCIM folders; however, they're empty. Crap.

So I went online and found PhotoRec Version 7.1 WIP and followed the instructions on the Step-by-step page (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step), which were clear enough. I ran the scan twice and both times only got about 3GB of un-openable .gz files. The first run was done without keeping corrupted files to no avail so I did a second run with keeping corrupted files in an attempt to see some data, but I got the same thing both times. There is not a single photo in the recovery. This seems really crazy to me because this is not the first time the SD card has been used. Even if nothing wrote to the card during this photo session (which I don't see how that could be the case because I could scroll back and see previous pictures as I was going and the T2i doesn't have internal storage), this card has been used many previous times so I would think I should see some old photos somewhere.

So I am really confused. Does anyone have any ideas how this could happen? Or any other things I could try with PhotoRec? I haven't tried TestDisk. Thank you for your help and insight. I appreciate it.

When running PhotoRec, try [Whole] instead of [Free].
If it doesn't work, you card may be wiped or damaged.

Thank you for your reply. The scans I ran were already using [Whole] instead of [Free]. The card definitely wasn't wiped, but I guess it could be damaged. When inserted into a computer, the card looks as though it can be written to; I am just wary of testing it because I would not want to overwrite any potential pictures. Any other ideas? Thank you for your help.

Run TestDisk, select the SD card, select None for the partition table type, Advanced, Image Creation.
Compress (ie. zip) the image.dd file. As jpg can not be compressed, if you have 100 Mb of pictures to recover, the compressed file should should be at least 100 Mb.

If the SD card has been wiped/zeroed, the compressed file will be very small. No data can be recovered in this case.