Recovering images from Compact Flash

drays

So we were at a Christening yesterday of some friends little girl, and took loads of photos on my dslr on a formatted (empty) CF card. Mrs drays plugs it into the card reader last night, the photos flash up then disappear. Now the card says its empty (no files and 964Mb free on a 1 Gb card). Put it back in the camera and it says there's a problem with the CF card. So, corrupt card.



Can anyone recommend any tools for recovering the photos?

lastant

There's some hints and tips in this thread, after Greg66 was having issues last week.

Data Recovery company that was recommended is this one, although they quoted me c.£500 (inc. VAT) to try and retrieve files off a 16Gb USB memory stick!

UndercoverElephant

Sounds like the reader cut the power off to the card when it was busy writing control information. This is the bane of a flash card's life (and the reason why it's worth spending the extra on a proper one). You may be lucky and get the files back using some of the "undelete" style software, but do it soon, before the flash gets re-used.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecov ... ograms.htm

drays

lastant wrote:

There's some hints and tips in this thread, after Greg66 was having issues last week.

Yeah i saw that thread, I was hoping for a bit of software to try on the card

lastant wrote:

Data Recovery company that was recommended is this one, although they quoted me c.£500 (inc. VAT) to try and retrieve files off a 16Gb USB memory stick!

The photos are ok but they aren't worth that much to me!

drays

Thanks undercoverelephant - I'll have a look at that

cyclingprop

I got a free reg code when I last bought an SD card... it was a sandisk extreme cat 10 card, so assume a similar offer would run with CF. You could hit two birds with one stone and get a new card and some software.

HasselHough

recuva is your friend here.

do a google, think you can get it as freeware.

same thing happened to my mum and dads CF card after their hols, but i managed to recover all the photos. very easy to use as well.

good luck

jomoj

another thumbs up for recuva.
http://www.piriform.com/recuva/download

As long as the card is still recognised as a drive when connected to your PC you should be able to get the images off. You should first try connecting the camera with card to your PC and running a scan in recuva on whichever drive letter it gets assigned.

drays

Thanks, I'll see if I can get it to run.

Anyone got any recommendations for using on a mac?

UndercoverElephant

Disk Drill is meant to be very good. Free too.

http://www.cleverfiles.com/

davis

If you're on a Mac try PhotoRec. It's part of the very useful testdisk suite.

drays

Thanks guys, I've got plently to try out when I get home tonight!