help! two cards full of precious work photos lost

[bunbun]

hello all

am in rather a desperate panic / major sulk and wonder if someone can help me

two days ago, i filled two 4gig kingston cards with images during a photo shoot

when i got back to base, i popped the cards in the card reader and hooked it up to an unfamiliar (not my own) laptop

the autorun script ran and ran but the first card didn't show up (drive:I didn't show a little eos folder) so i cancelled - which took a loooong time - the autorun script and pulled out the card

a message said something like "error writing to drive:I" which i rather foolishly ignored

then i swapped the cards over and repeated the steps above - and got the same message when i pulled out the card

suddenly it dawned on me what the message had meant: windows had been trying to do something TO the card rather than just read it - and i had probably just screwed up two, rather than one card

the next step was to put the cards back in the camera to see if i could (a) view the images still, and (b) download them directly from the camera.

horror of horrors: i got a message in camera (i shoot with a 5d by the way) saying that the card(s) was not formatted

then i started googling photo recovery and dropped a help message in dpreview

following various suggestions, i have tried to extract the photos off the card using the paidfor software photorecovery and the free program zar (and one other i can't remember)

all three recovery attempts resulted in the same thing: the programs could see the files on the cards and successfully copied them to a folder on the desktop

the file sizes (c. 4mbs and c. 12mbs respectively) and suffixes (.jpg and .cr2) were also the expected ones (and the computer gave them the appropriate icons too) BUT when i right clicked on the files to open them - whether it was in photoshop, bridge, faststone maxviewer or the standard windows viewer - i got a message which said that the files were the wrong sort and/or were probably corrupted (or words to that efect depending on which app i was trying to do the opening with)

subsequently, following some advice from a dpreview user, i opened a .cr2 file in notepad and found the words canon eos amongs the gibberish; and then i opened the same file in exiftool and found some, though not very much, familiar looking exif data

i decided to ask for help here when i couldn't work out how to get exiftool to extract a thumbnail for me (all a bit codelike and scary it looked to my gui-accustomed eyes)

to recap then, i have two corrupted/strangely reformatted cards full of photos which i have managed to recover and which look like the kinds of files they should be BUT which i can't open

two young models, a fashion stylist, a makeup artist and a magazine editor are all eager to see those images, as am i -who flew to dublin as a A FAVOUR to a friend to make them in the first place

any suggestions how to proceed will make me (and all of them) very happy indeed; and the right suggestion will result in a bottle of wine being couriered to your door

please please pretty please..!

thanks very much,

ben

[xnview]

any suggestions how to proceed will make me (and all of them) very happy indeed; and the right suggestion will result in a bottle of wine being couriered to your door

I think that software exists to recover deleted memory card

[bunbun]

thanks for your answer but no bottle of wine i fear

i already said i had tried three different apps to recover the lost files

[Troken]

i already said i had tried three different apps to recover the lost files

A couple of years ago I had an incident with a HD which got corrupted (due to a hardware failure). After trying many recover apps, only one could actually save all my data: ActiveUndelete. If you haven't already tried it, maybe you should.

http://www.active-undelete.com/
After testing the app I bought it, but Im sure they have newer versions today.

Hope you'll manage to save your files.

[rra]

Bunbun, what programs did you already try so far ??

I had succesfull restoration of all JPG images on a mem. stick
using the program "restoration" ,
I have used version 2.5.14 .
It is free so you can give it a try,
you have to have administrator account to get the program working.

Anyway good luck restoring you files ,


René

[jis]

I have personal experience with data recovery company here in Czech Republic. They can extract data even from electronically damaged cards - those cards, which don't appeared as a disk drive, when you slip them into card reader, so you cannot use any apps for recovering the lost files. They obviously have know-how how to disassemble card to chips and connect directly to flash memory chips.

http://www.zachrana-dat.cz/en/data-recovery-enter.html

BUT when i right clicked on the files to open them - whether it was in photoshop, bridge, faststone maxviewer or the standard windows viewer - i got a message which said that the files were the wrong sort and/or were probably corrupted (or words to that efect depending on which app i was trying to do the opening with)

But if you try something yourself at home without appropriate knowledge in a bad way you probably mangled existing data on the card. The first golden rule in such a situation is - You must immediately after incident set write protect on the card before attempt to try any recovery operation. The second golden rule is - You must recover your precious data to different disk, not on the bad card itself.

[Lesmo16]

Recuva will do it!

[jasonmillman]

I had a similar problem with my Canon SX100IS, it would see the images on the camera, but when I downloaded whatever was on the card, many/most were corrupted/unreadable. I then connected the camera itself (wth memory card installed) directly to the computer and tried via Canon's download software, and it worked! Later, the same problem happened, and I connected the camera/memory card combo and downloaded with a separate non-Canon program, and that worked also. Not sure why but somehow the card didn't like being installed in my card readers (plural). It doesn't happen all the time, when it does the card has had a good number of images on them. Hope this helps...Jason

[rra]

Hey Jason ,

maybe your memory-card has been formatted into FAT16,
that way windows only knows how to read a max. of 512 images on its root-folder; if the filenames of the images are longer then 8.3 chars,
this max. number even gets smaller.
Your Canon software possibly bypasses this limitation ??

René