I thought I’d dump some information that has been sitting up in my mind and occasionally gets jarred free when someone asks me. As I work in the computer industry as a Systems Administrator and also dabble in photography (www.hiddencreekphoto.com) I get a fair number of questions and requests regarding bad flash cards. By flash cards I mean any of the myriad of photo storage cards that fit in a digital camera (compact flash, SD, MMC, MemoryStick, etc…).
Every once in a while someone will either get a corrupted card or accidentally delete the contents, or a single photo, of a card. When I end up getting asked what to do, it’s usually because that someone has some special photos they want to recover. To that end, I’d suggest taking these steps to help possibly recover lost pictures:
1. DON’T PANIC=DON’T DO ANYTHING ELSE
While this may seem silly, it is the best first course of action. If you don’t know what you’re doing, just stop. That’s the beauty of this type of media (flash cards), if you don’t do anything, it won’t get worse. It’s not like being bitten by a rabid dog and hoping not touching it will make it better (by the way, if you are reading this and have been bitten by a rabid dog, please call 911). If you don’t do anything to the card, you stand a fair chance of recovering some, if not all, of the photos on the card. So take a breath and realize you stand a good chance of making things worse if you act right away. Those pictures, if they can be recovered, will be in the EXACT same state tomorrow as they are today if you don’t muck with it.
2. If you’re adventurous, get a few programs
The first program for Windows I’d suggest getting is dd. dd is a simple program that will copy one disk to either another disk or a file, block by block. By that I mean it doesn’t actually look at the data and format, it just copies one block of info at a time. Time of it as taking a large painting and instead of pulling it apart, just taking a 1″x1″ square and making a copy of that…then the next and next and next until it’s all there. You don’t have to know how to paint to copy like this and dd doesn’t care which format your card is (FAT, FAT32, etc…), it’ll just make a copy. It’s an ultimate backup kinda thing at this point. I’d suggest this free program to help with dd functions.
With that true backup in hand, you can now fiddle a little knowing you can use dd to replace the original, messed up, contents.
The first thing to try is a flash recovery program. This is a computer program that will read the contents of the card as it sees it, not as the table of contents describes. You see, when you format a card you are essentially just removing the table of contents and telling the card it’s okay to write over the old data. Unless you do a low level format (some newer cameras have this feature and it does help to run it once in a while), all that is lost is the table of contents. This is the easiest type of problem to fix. The harder instances are when a card has been corrupted. Basically this means not only are the table of contents probably messed up, but some of the ‘pages’ (if you’re following the book analogy) have been ripped out, cut up or had a hot chocolate spilled on them. In this case, recovery is harder and quite frankly, you won’t likely get all your images back in one piece.
My favorite flash recovery program is called Flash File Recovery. Nifty name, huh? I’ve used it multiple times with good results and it’s a great place to start. You can download it for free and see if it can find any files on your card. From there, recovery is simple, but the program costs close to fifty bucks, so you need to make sure you really want those pictures. I have had to deal with corrupted cards before and when this program showed them to me, half messed up and ugly, no other program could improve on the results, let alone, recover the photos. Most other programs had a hard time even finding the files. So for me, with the large amount of photos Kim and I shoot, it was a no brainer to pay the money and just keep a copy handy. It’s also fairly lightweight so keeping it on a jumpdrive would be a good idea.
Here are some other options in the file recovery field. I haven’t tried them all so I can’t comment on all of them, but Image Rescue also has good results (but I don’t like the interface too much):
Again, look for a program you are comfortable with as most offer the ability to ‘discover’ any missing/corrupt images for free and then you need to pay in order to recover them.
3. Ask for help
If the options above look like more than you want to work with, then please feel free to drop me a line and ask for some help. I’ve done a lot of recoveries over the years (yes, I even admit to deleting a card myself….which was fully recovered)and while I can’t guarantee results, I’d be glad to give you a hand in recovering your precious memories from the dreaded realm of the bad photo card.
