Be Excellent To Each Other

I have an SD card from my camera that I put in the Mac. Annoyingly the Mac has rendered the card unreadable. Windows now insists it wants to format the card while Mac OSX wants to initialize the card. However the data is still on there.

I used Zero Assumption Recovery under Windows to recover the data but all the files are corrupted. Hardly any of the files open and those that do are corrupted?

Anyone have any ideas? Preferably free ideas? This is most important for tedious reasons I won't go into but may result in my death.

Have you tried putting it back in your camera? Do you see the pictures there? If so, could you transfer them via USB?

Also (long shot, this one), have you tried taking it to Jessops and seeing if their machines can read the pics? If they can, get them transferred to CD in the shop.

The camera isn't interested, neither is a PC or a Mac.

As I say, I have taken a copy of the card using the software I mentioned and most of the file sizes look right, but I'll be fucked if I can open the files. The card is corrupt. It has a corrupted MBR and bad sectors. It's not a card I will use again if I can help it.

Yep, as Ian says, try popping it back in the camera. This happened when I put an SD card in my brothers PC a few times, but putting it back in the camera sorted it out each time. Fingers crossed it works for you!

EDIT: poo.

OK so I now have about 400 megs worth of JPG's painfully extracted from the corrupted card. However only one of the 100 or so photos opens and that is totally corrupted.

So I have 400 meg of data, but is it useless? Every package I try to open the files gives the same results. Anyone know if I'm wasting my time?

[edit] actually I am as the files I have recovered appear to be empty when I open then in Notepad. Grrrr.

If the camera can't get anything useful you almost certainly are boned I'm afraid.

I wrote a utility once to scan a dumped image of an entire memory card looking for JPGs. It was the same problem, massive filesystem corruption but the data was still in there. I recovered a mate's sister's graduation photos.

I can run that tool over the card if you like, and can get a bitwise dump of the card's contents to me (I used the dd command under Linux, I think OS X has the same command).

Thanks. Something to look at when I get back from hols (off in 3 hours and now need to get a new memory card). I'll revive this when I get back!

Cheers.

Rightyho. Let me know if I can help. I'll dig out the hard drive with that tool on, just in case.

In terms of software, GraphicConverter is probably your best bet for trying to rescue iffy files. In the past, it's opened items for me that Photoshop and Finder have refused to deal with.

I went to the local photo shop for a new card, but they've taken the old card to see if they can recover it with their software. I hold out little hope but as I'm away for the week anyway I thought what the hell. So I guess I'll have to work out what do to from there.

Cheers.

Cheers, I'll take a look at that. But like I say, I think the files are actually empty!

In the past I've found that card readers do cause this problem with mine from time to time, but putting it back in the camera and rebooting it a few times has fixed it. The only time it didn't, Linux was able to mount the card and read it okay, so I copied the pictures off and reformatted it.

Good luck with it.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec - this has worked for me on a good few occasions, and is pleasingly thorough and configurable.

CG Security? Does that envelope your SD card with FuriousRage^TM, scaring all the pictures back to life?