Death of a CF card

[joan_sousa]

Help! Strange thing happened today. I am a student and shoot with a Rebel

XT. I was shooting today for about a half hour, and took only ~30 indoor

pictures. Later, I reviewed the pictures, no problem (not bad,even). I went

to show them to someone, and I got "no image" on the LCD screen. Then I got a

CF error. Tried everything. Shut the camera off and turned it back on. Nada.

Took out that battery, put it back in, CF error still flashing at me. Tried to

reformat the card in the camera - got the dreaded err 99. Yikes. Stuck my 1Gb

Transcend Compact Flash in the card reader and into the PC - no dice - again,

no images. Tried some recovery software "no images to be recovered." I am

stumped, frustrated and just at a loss. Help, anyone??? At this point, I am

not nearly as concerned about the cost of the Transcend card or its

replacement than I am of the images that I've (gulp) lost. Any guidance would

be most appreciated.

 

Cheers,

Joan in MA

[wisp]

I have personally had very good luck recovering images using 'photorec': http://www.cgsecurity.org/photorec.html - I ran it under linux, but it appears to be ported to windows as well. I have used it three times, twice with good results - the disks in all three cases did not even appear to be valid media to the operating system.

 

Good luck. Once you recover the images, you should be able to do some low level disk work to refresh the partition table and then reformat. I am still using (with no errors) disks that had previously 'failed' (although I will honestly say that I don't trust them very much)

[gluteal cleft]

There's a program called "Nucleus Kernel FAT" that has recovered images for me under conditions that other programs couldn't. It's a free download, give it a shot.

 

As for the cost of a replacement, call Transcend's tech support, maybe it's under warranty.

 

If you could boot into a Knoppix CD, you could do:

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512

 

And wait for it to finish, then under Windows, create a partition of the correct type, then stick it in the camera and format it. I've "resurrected" a couple of cards that way. Be sure to replace "sda" with the appropriate drive letter for your reader, or you'll wipe out something you might want to keep.

 

steve

[hm1]

<<I have personally had very good luck recovering images using 'photorec': http://www.cgsecurity.org/photorec.html >>

 

Thank you for the info Joshua<

 

I just recovered all my files (I had similar problem) from a Lexar CF using this program.

[andrew_kua]

Argh! I am facing the same problem and desperately need to get the photos outta that card.

 

I read about "If you could boot into a Knoppix CD, you could do:

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 "

 

May I know what does this do? I am not familiar with Linux but managed to boot from a Knoppix CD. Anyone can guide me from there? What is the device name for a card reader?

 

Thank you in anticipation