How to recover lost pictures from a corrupt xD card
Imagine my despair. I slip my xD card into the card reader and instead of the usual display, a strange column of folders and files, all named with a string of question marks, appears. I try rebooting. Clicking on My Computer, I find an empty drive where my pictures should be. I try plugging the reader into my laptop. Empty. I put the card back into the camera. No image - and if I try to take a picture, I get a series of warning beeps.
This is where the despair comes in. You see these weren't just any pictures. They were photographs taken at my granddaughter's birthday party. Especially requested by my daughter, who has only just begun talking to me again after I wrote her car off (don't ask), because she knew she would be too busy. The cake. The candles. The guests. The dancing. Seventy-odd pictures of general mayhem.
To cut a long story slightly less long, I spent the next 48 hours googling and downloading like crazy, searching for various combinations of 'data recovery', 'free software' and 'corrupt xD card'. The first program I found, Data Doctor Recovery Memory Card (A bit of a mouthful, and I would have thought it should be called Doctor Data Recovery, but what do I know?) if nothing else gave me hope. There on the card it showed me a load of jpegs taken on September 20. But I had to send about £20 to be able to see and save those pictures. Coincidentally that's how much the good folk at Fuji wanted per card to transfer my mangled pics and save them on a CD. Which seems a bit steep when it's their card/camera that's mangled my pics. Another program - RecoverPlus Pro - also said it wanted money before I could save the pictures but it was cheaper so I gave it a try. Astonishingly, it put all the pictures into a cache which I could copy! The bad news was that it seemed able only to find files that I had deleted. My birthday party pics were nowhere to be seen.
But this story does have a happy ending. A good 36 hours after I had begun my journey, by googling 'data recovery xd card' I chanced upon the Digital Inspiration blog, which had a review of a couple of programs, one of which was ZAR, and the encouraging sentence: 'While ZAR 8.0 is a commercial product, the picture recovery features are free and fully functional even inside the trial version.' I downloaded it and by golly it was true. The site says it works with Windows 98SE which is a fib - but at least it works with XP. The program is indeed intended for hardcore data recovery, but it is also a life-saver. Run it and select a source device such as a camera memory card, it clicks and whirrs for a little while and then presents you with what it has found, which in my case was 70-odd pictures taken at my granddaughter's birthday party. Gentle reader, I can sleep again!
This is where the despair comes in. You see these weren't just any pictures. They were photographs taken at my granddaughter's birthday party. Especially requested by my daughter, who has only just begun talking to me again after I wrote her car off (don't ask), because she knew she would be too busy. The cake. The candles. The guests. The dancing. Seventy-odd pictures of general mayhem.
To cut a long story slightly less long, I spent the next 48 hours googling and downloading like crazy, searching for various combinations of 'data recovery', 'free software' and 'corrupt xD card'. The first program I found, Data Doctor Recovery Memory Card (A bit of a mouthful, and I would have thought it should be called Doctor Data Recovery, but what do I know?) if nothing else gave me hope. There on the card it showed me a load of jpegs taken on September 20. But I had to send about £20 to be able to see and save those pictures. Coincidentally that's how much the good folk at Fuji wanted per card to transfer my mangled pics and save them on a CD. Which seems a bit steep when it's their card/camera that's mangled my pics. Another program - RecoverPlus Pro - also said it wanted money before I could save the pictures but it was cheaper so I gave it a try. Astonishingly, it put all the pictures into a cache which I could copy! The bad news was that it seemed able only to find files that I had deleted. My birthday party pics were nowhere to be seen.
But this story does have a happy ending. A good 36 hours after I had begun my journey, by googling 'data recovery xd card' I chanced upon the Digital Inspiration blog, which had a review of a couple of programs, one of which was ZAR, and the encouraging sentence: 'While ZAR 8.0 is a commercial product, the picture recovery features are free and fully functional even inside the trial version.' I downloaded it and by golly it was true. The site says it works with Windows 98SE which is a fib - but at least it works with XP. The program is indeed intended for hardcore data recovery, but it is also a life-saver. Run it and select a source device such as a camera memory card, it clicks and whirrs for a little while and then presents you with what it has found, which in my case was 70-odd pictures taken at my granddaughter's birthday party. Gentle reader, I can sleep again!
posted by Graham at 9:38 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home