Pictures Recovered from my Hitachi 4gb Microdrive that Failed

Just want to thank you all for trying to help me out with my post of

two weeks ago when my microdrive failed! and I thought I lost half

of a wedding that I shot... What a wreck I was... The card was just

dead. And I had no warning. Don't know what went wrong. No

software would help. I contacted several "recovery" services and had

been quoted as much as a possible $4,000 for the recovery. Another

local photographer gave me the name of Tallyns.com. They hadn't

needed to use the service but Scott Tallyn was just great. He

seemed very knowledgable and was very reassuring. So I took the

chance and I sent my microdrive to him in Illinois and he worked on

it as soon as he got it. He recovered my shots and returned to me

asap. He charged me $425. What a relief. Now I just have to

figure out how to prevent this from happening again. I plan to use

separate cards (I had used 2 for this particular wedding and had the

reception at least) but now I plan to use one for wedding

preparation, one for ceremony, one for romantics and one for the

reception. So if one card fails, it won't be as awful. I do have

insurance that includes "errors & omissions" and I had just got it

prior to this wedding. Has anyone ever had to face this situation?

Ken:

 

Congrats! I've never had this problem but am curious about your insurance. Is this a rider to your homeowners policy, and what does it cover and how much does it cost?

 

Thanks much.

 

/ron

It it makes you feel any better, at my wedding, one of the film rolls failed. Unfortuniately, it was the roll on my side of the family, and my family is not local, so most of the reprints that would have happened, didn't.

I'm glad this ended (fairly) well for you. There are people that recommend never using a microdrive for valuable images. The assumption being that they are more prone to fail. Maybe they are, but solid state CF cards also fail too. I've had one go, and a lot of other people have too. So there really are no garanties. There were occasionally similar problems with fim too. I guess there are good reasons to use a camera with two card slots if both can be written to at the same time.

 

Does anyone know if there are ways to retrieve data from the complete failure of a regular memory card like there are ways to recover data from a failed microdrive? A primarily mechanical drive can be opened and the platter forced to spin if a motor fails, and the heads can be replaced if needed. But what if a solid state device completely fails. Are there ways to rescue the bits of info that remain? I've used file recovery software on them with good luck, but sometimes they really fail completely.

 

Is this an argument for the higher security of a microdrive?

Check the latest issue of Digital Photo Pro magazine for an excellent article on this issue. Brief synopsis: Images can usually be recovered from CF cards unless the card has been reformatted. Also, CF cards are less prone to failure than microdrives.

CF cards can also fail. Any "device" can. But solid state flash memory cards are much, much less likely to fail than an electro-mechanical device like a Microdrive with it's intricate moving parts. Trade the microdrives for flash cards. Also consider a portable storage/backup solution like the Epson P-2000. You can get one for less than what it cost to recover your images. If you get one, use it to keep a second copy of what's on your memory cards. Don't erase/format them until you transfer to your computer. That way you'll always have two copies in case either a card or the P-2000 fail. Since this your business, better to be safe than sorry...which I'm sure you're well aware of already.

Not putting all eggs in one basket means:

 

-use 2 cameras or more, and shoot with both.

 

-use many smaller Compact Flash cards, e.g. 1GB.

 

If you have remotely controllable camera, e.g. D2X, or future D200, then sending pictures directly to a near-by remote laptop (or desktop), and seeing them on big screen would give double protection - though you would need 1 or more assistants. Best yet make your laptop (or desktop) with redundant RAID hard disk array, so your pictures are saved to 2 disks simultaneously.

Someone in this thread mentioned about recovery from a microdrive and was wondering about how recoverable a solid state card is...

 

As an electrical engineer, I just wanted to point out a couple of things:

 

1) Unless the microdrive failure is due to a head crash (meaning that it touched down on the magnetic platter surface, usually grinding off the magnetic oxide), you are MORE likely to be able to recover the data from a microdrive as it will still exist on the platter (won't be cheap, however)

 

2) Usually solid state memory failures are catastrophic (destroying layers of semiconductor material, usually making them permanently non-conducting)...in these instances, you cannot recover the data. If you had a "ham-fisted" moment, and broke bond wires, in theory (and in actual practice assuming you have access to the proper equipment in a clean room environment or $$$$$$$$) you could recover. This recovery would be more expensive than the drive recover (both should be done in a clean room, but the solid state memory requires things to be kept much cleaner).

<i>No software would help.</i>

<P>

How do you know?

<p>

No offense intended, but that service doesn't appear to deal with damaged hardware, and the price doesn't reflect the labor involved in tearing a drive apart. I can think of at least two programs that perform in a stellar fashion for nearly all card failures.

<P>

Did they tell you what the problem was?

<p>

DI

<i>"CF cards are less prone to failure than microdrives."</I>

<p>

<I>"...solid state flash memory cards are much, much less likely to fail than an electro-mechanical device like a Microdrive..."</I>

<P>

Simple logic would say that these statements are probably true, but does anyone have any info proving this. Has anyone seen failure rate statistics on either?

<P>

George, that is exactly the info I was looking for, and what I expected. We assume, probably correctly, that failure rates are higher with microdrives, but in most circumstances the majority of images could be recovered from a failed micro drive if they were needed badly enough to pay the price. With a truely failed solid state memory card this would generally not be possible. I have had one of these failures, and none of the software that I tried would get the computer to even recognize that a card was attached. Most of the time a card fails it is because some bit of data got screwed up in the FAT or something, and all you need do is use one of the file/data recovery software packages out there to get all your pictures back, but sometimes...

 

<P>

So it seems microdrives score at least one point for data security.

<i>There are people that recommend never using a microdrive for valuable images. The assumption being that they are more prone to fail. Maybe they are, but solid state CF cards also fail too. I've had one go, and a lot of other people have too.</i>

<p>

Jim, I think you would have a very big sampling error. If you know 10 people whose microdrive has failed and 10 people whose CF cards have failed, it probably meand that MDs are 100 times more likely to fail as CF cards probably outsell MDs at least 100 to 1.

<p>

Of course I have no data on this, but I literally know only one person who USED to own an MD, currently I know no users at all. Yet 9 out of 10 times someone seems to complain here about data loss, it is an MD user.

Please look in Internet for a software called PCINSPECTOR SMART RECOVERY. ( WWW.CONVAR.DE )

 

It's FREE and has recovered some three cards unreadable by my cameras or PC's and, when I say recovered I mean that ALL PICTURES was recovered.

 

Give it a try.

All I know is, that during my many years working with computers and electronics I've had several hard drives fail. These have been both in stationary desktop machines and laptops. I've never used a microdrive so I can't do more than speculate on them based on what I've heard. But I've personally never experienced any failure with flash memory. I've heard other people have problems, but some of those I ended up finding out it was user error. <p>There's flash memory in almost every electronic device you buy today...cell phones, computer motherboards, PDA's, MP3 players, some a/v equipment, etc... With such widespread use, if flash memory was overly prone to failure, there would be more problems out there.<p>In digital cameras (and many other devices), flash memory is not just used for the memory card, but is also used to hold the firmware for the device. That's how we're able to upgrade the firmware. Flash memory eclipsed other non-volatile, re-writable memory (EPROMs) a number of years ago.<p>

I know that many flash cards, ipods, cell phones, etc. get banged around a lot by people carrying them in their pockets or throwing them in bags/purses/backpacks or dropping them occassionally. I'm one who does that, and I've never seen a memory failure. Sure it's possible, just has been less likely in my experience.

Well, like I said, simple logic would lead us to believe that solid state devices are more stable. Certainly they can withstand more shock, and even a beating from a washing machine. Still, it would be good to see failure statistics to know what the percentages of risk are. I know the 2.2 GB MagicStore devices have a reputation for poor durability, but the latest Hitachi 2, 4 & 6 GB devices are highly regarded. At least until one fails on you.

 

Personally, I have more CF cards than I have ever used at a wedding, but I bought a 4 GB microdrive just in case I need more memory at the end of a shoot. The risk of loosing the last hour of a reception doesn't seem to scare me as much as loosing the ceremony. And meanwhile, I've been using it a lot to make sure I'm not going to have an early failure that I don't discover until it becomes important. But it is nice to know that with enough money I stand a good chance of data recovery from the microdrive.

 

I also have a 20 GB portable storage device, but I don't trust that either. At least not enough to erase & reuse a card at a wedding. The errors & omissions insurance is probably a good idea.

for peace of mind, you almost have to bring a laptop along, dump your card, burn to dvd, re-use your card. it's the only way i will do it.