the beauty of an 8 gig memory card is that i can store a lot of pictures on it and i don’t have to worry about running out of space while i’m shooting pictures. the bad thing is that i don’t download them right away cause i’ve got lots of space. can you see where this is going? so i had an 8 gig sd memory card that had lots of pictures and videos of daily life, my family, family vacations etc. i was able to view the pictures just fine on my camera but when i put the card into my computer i received this dreaded message, “card is not formatted, format now?” now speaking of memory… since i didn’t post this right away, like i said i was going to, i have forgotten the order of and all of the actions that took place after seeing that message. but the gist of it is, a variety of desperate attempts were made until it became clear that there was no way to get my computer and later my camera to see the contents of the memory card, it was corrupted. but, as always google to the rescue. i entered in something about my memory card not reading and i found several posts that referenced, photorec, a free program for digital picture recovery. here’s their description:
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s file system has been severely damaged or reformatted. AMAZING!
they provide clear, step by step directions. it looks like you are working in dos mode if i remember right but just do what it says. photorec recovered all of my photos and videos! most importantly, if you have accidentally deleted a file you want to retrieve or you are having a problem with a disk or card, do NOT add any more files, pictures etc. because you may overwrite the files making it impossible to retrieve them.
that’s my tip for the day, now i’m off to download a 2 months of pics from my 16 gig card. will i never learn?!
