How to recover data from a corrupt memory card

[FatalSaviour]

Hey guys.

I'm aware that this may sound more like a plug than anything else, so I hope this ok...please feel free to skip down a few paragraphs if you don't want to hear my tale of woe though

About 4 months ago I purchased a Dane-Elec x80 4GB card from Scan. About 2 months in, I started getting the odd (1 in 100) corrupt image on my Canon EOS300D. At the time, I thought no big worry, it's rare, and could possibly be the camera.

Anyway, last night, I'd got about 2.5 gig of images to transfer, some JPEG and some RAW, so a fair few pictures in all, so I pop it into my cardreader (also purchased from Scan) and away it goes, transferring them to my PC.
About 70 pictures in however, it stops copying, and tells me an unexpected error has occurred. After this, I can no longer access the card - it's telling me it needs to be formatted first.

Now, at this point I was seriously worried. Although there were no particularly important photos on there, there were 2 weeks worth of holiday that I thought had gone down the drain.

The lesson I learnt however, is not to just give up and write them off (as a friend did with a Corsair MicroSD card that was corrupted in his N73.

I downloaded PhotoRescue 3.0 from www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

To my great relief, it seems to have been able to copy everything off the disk - there's a few photos which it couldn't restore to the right folder, but it's stored them in a separate folder for me to go through instead. All my pictures are now safely stored on my hard drive, but I just wanted to share my story, and recommend the program to anyone else that might be facing a similar issue, whether with a corrupt SD, CF, xD etc card.

In my opinion, it's been well worth $29 already, and I'm more confident about situations like this in the future (although I will be trying to RMA this card later today!).
Until today, I wasn't aware that programs like this existed, or at least that they actually had any chance of success, so I hope this helps someone else.

P.S. I'm aware that there are also other programs out there that are designed for the same purpose, for example, Digital PhotoRescue Professional available at www.objectrescue.com/products/photorescuepro/ although I haven't used this, so can't comment on how effective this is.

[Bobster]

i used Recover My Files when i had 3 of my 2GB CF's full of RAW go down after a duff connection with my portable HDD.. it was the only thing at the time that would recover them!

[this_is_gav]

I've added Zero Assumption Recovery to my arsenal. It's pretty awesome, with every option I can imagine available. Even has dedicated modes for RAID systems, and yes, memory cards (and the digital image recovery part can apparently be used freely in the demo). £30 very, very well spent.

[Zero 101]

Lexar have very kindly made this available, foc, to anyone who's 'purchased' one of their cards.
Besides photo/file recovery there is a card test and formatting option.

http://store.lexar.com/imagerescue3/

[Andeh13]

Photo loss is really frustrating, that is why I use to keep creating regular backups files and thus easily avert the situations which can drive me to unintentional photo loss situations. but in cases is yours, if you have your lost data on other storage media, then simply recover them from there, but if all those become unable to let you access whatever you lost them, finally go through any trusted third party photo recovery solutions

Source: <Removed>

Thank YOU, for your the semi-coherent babble. The world would be a hollow and empty without it. THANK YOU AGAIN FOR YOUR POST.

[mekeirc]

Recuva.

Freeware by Piriform.

[crmster84]

I used to Use GerDataBackForNTFS /FAT I had the NTFS version but it was good,

Companies name is R-Data or Runtime Sortware from memory Get it

[markwilliams279]

I recovered my photos and other media files from memory card with the help of Stellar recovery software In the demo version i was able to see the preview of the lost photos and then I tried the full version from the website.

[bledd]

PhotoRec, it's free and awesome

[KaoerGreen]

In my experience, there are two kinds of data loss from SD card. The first is spoken about in this article, and can be solved using software. However, my problem was that my card could not be read by any software, it just said 'unknown device'.

If you have this problem, then the only company I know of who can solve it are called Vibosoft who are based in Germany. What they do is to actually open up the SD card and solder the memory chips onto another form of reader in order to read the data. This gets around the problem of the faulty controller. Learn How to retrieve deleted files from a formatted SD card, They then save the files from the memory chips and send it to you via FTP or via a DVD. Understandably, it's more expensive than just a software based recovery, but they got back many photos that are very precious to me when I thought the situation was lost.

[george1979]

I've also used Recuva - it worked well for me. Ever since my harrowing data loss incident (after filming a wedding) I'm now almost pathological about backing stuff up asap. Even to the point that I'll hire someone to come along with that in mind.

Glad you got your files back - its a nice feeling when it works

[adonismark]

The best solution to recover data from a corrupt memory card is to use a data recovery software called Amrev data recovery tool, which is advanced data recovery software which recovers data from corrupted or damage memory card.


This software does a much more than what a Memory cards can do. This tool has the most advanced algorithms ever designed to recover deleted or lost data from corrupted memory cards archive data file.

[markwilliams279]

Have you tried stellar photo recovery software that i suggested?

[markwilliams279]

If found any problem in downloading it, find it here. <spamvertising link>