CompactFlash JPG Data Recovery software??

photobug · April 5, 2004

Apparently, I finally did it. Somehow hosed up a CF card so that almost
a hundred photos are on it, the camera can display them, but WinXP
can't see the files. It reports available space (low) on the device
correctly, the top directories are present, but the JPG files appear
to be missing in action (on the PC -- the *camera* still sees them).

I know there was a data(image)-recovery software package that some
magazine article gushed over, saying that it was a "must-have" item
in case this came up. Does anyone know which one that would be,
and where to get it?

...I downloaded a demo version of one called mediaRECOVER. It
seems to be able to find most of the photos -- but (1) it did
NOT recover the file names, (2) at least one photo it got
wrong (produced a montage of 3 photos), (3) I can't tell if it
can recover the file modification times or not, and (4) it won't
save the ones it found unless I pony up $30 for the full version.
I'd rather have the "right" software before laying down the
greenbacks.

I do know that, before using this CF card again, I'm going to
reformat it in the camera. But I have to recoved these JPGs
first.

Any help / pointers / voices of experience appreciated ...

wxwax · April 5, 2004

No experience... mercifully.

I have the Lexar photo recovery software, which came bundled with the 1GB CF card. I can try attaching that in an e-mail, if you'd like. Dunno if that would work.

A magazine I picked up today called Photolife recommends a software called PhotoRescue made by Data rescue, a belgian company. It costs $29. They give extensive directions for how to use it, including recommending the Expert level.

Here's the link to their website.

jimf · April 5, 2004

wxwax wrote:

A magazine I picked up today called Photolife recommends a software called PhotoRescue made by Data rescue, a belgian company. It costs $29. They give extensive directions for how to use it, including recommending the Expert level.

Let me second the recommendation. The software works and works well; it has saved photos from a SM card that freaked out on me and froma CF card that I accidentally reformatted and from a CF card I corrupted by swapping cards and then "ejecting" the wrong card (whoops).

It's not perfect, sometimes it can't recover image names and sometimes you get an image that is composed of parts of others, but overall it works extremely well. It is well worth $29.

photobug · April 5, 2004

Thanks!

wxwax wrote:

... http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue ...

jimf wrote:

Let me second the recommendation. The software ... overall works extremely well. It is well worth $29.

Thanks, wxwax and jimf -- I plan to download PhotoRescue tonight (or as soon as I finish my 1040, anyway ;-) ). Will keep my fingers crossed that it can rescue me from this one.

Also, now I'll remember to reformat my CF card in my camera before any important photographic event. That should eliminate a lot of potential problems.

pathfinder · April 5, 2004

wxwax wrote:

No experience... mercifully.

I have the Lexar photo recovery software, which came bundled with the 1GB CF card. I can try attaching that in an e-mail, if you'd like. Dunno if that would work.

A magazine I picked up today called Photolife recommends a software called PhotoRescue made by Data rescue, a belgian company. It costs $29. They give extensive directions for how to use it, including recommending the Expert level.

Here's the link to their website.

I can second wxwax's recommendation - I used PhotoRescue last night to salvage pictures on a Lexar 96Mb CF chip that seems to have gone south - it does not recover the file names - it renames them V1111, v11112 or something like that. But it did find and let me save the files to new media. $29 is a real bargain in the digital photography area

photobug · April 6, 2004

PhotoRescue is a winner!
I downloaded PhotoRescue last night and it did NOTICEABLY better than the other one I had tried (MediaRecover). PhotoRescue even recover the original filenames of 95% of the files! A quick scan through the thumbnails didn't reveal ANY artifacts, whereas MediaRecover had a few JPGs that appeared as weird composites of two or three JPGs (apparently couldn't chain the data blocks together as well as PhotoRescue does).

Now I just have to unlock the "full" version so I can actually save those 100 JPG files. (Visa rejected my attempted charge last night, probably either because I was bleary-eyed and mis-typed the cc#, or because the vendor is in Belgium and Visa decided that charge was out of my normal purchase patterns ... Guess I'll try AmEx today ;-) )

So based on what I saw last night, it looks like PhotoRescue is going to be a clear WINNER. (thanks again for the pointer to it!)

wxwax · April 8, 2004

That's good news, so far. I hope it all works out and you can rescue the files in their entirety.

colourbox · March 23, 2007

While I have not used PhotoRescue yet, the experiences described in this article have definitely put PhotoRescue on my to-buy list.
(Scroll down to the heading "Bad cards and accidental erasures")

photobug · March 23, 2007

colourbox wrote:

While I have not used PhotoRescue yet, the experiences described in this article have definitely put PhotoRescue on my to-buy list.

How odd for a thread I posted to 3 years ago to pop up again ...

I've used PhotoRescue about 3 times over the intervening years, and each time it recovered every single file from my CF card. It may not always be able to reconstruct the original filenames (and never seems to reconstruct the original file-modification timestamps), but has been 100% reliable in reassembling the data, which is the most important thing.

I just got a notice that a new version of PhotoRescue is now out, and plan to update my copy.

= Dave

pathfinder · May 8, 2007

Sandisk now offers RescuePro with many of their compact flash chips.

Lexar media uses/sells Image Rescue I believe.

I have used Rescue Pro recently, and it does work.

Anthony · May 9, 2007

I have used ImageRecall with some success in the past. They have some new versions available at... http://www.imagerecall.com/ for the typical £25.00 - $50 cost of this sort of software.

Anthony.

Art Scott · May 9, 2007

I have used Image Resue that came with my Lexar 2gb CF...it works great, I have not had a prob with images of mixed data...so far...(fingers crossed) all images have been perfect...both raw ands jpg alike...it comes on the Pro versions of Lexars cards and mack version is included...the version I have contains IMage Resue for Mack OS X

UP N MTNS · June 8, 2007

wxwax wrote:

A magazine I picked up today called Photolife recommends a software called PhotoRescue made by Data rescue, a belgian company. It costs $29. They give extensive directions for how to use it, including recommending the Expert level.

Here's the link to their website.

I lost a bunch of images on my CF card(HoodMan 4gb) it was my fault and thanks to the advice of a very helpful D-grinner

ziggy53 he pointed me to this thread......

I downloaded the above software and got all my lost images back

photobug · June 8, 2007

UP N MTNS wrote:

I lost a bunch of images on my CF card(HoodMan 4gb) it was my fault and thanks to the advice of a very helpful D-grinner ziggy53 he pointed me to this thread......
I downloaded the above software URL="http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/"]PhotoRescue[/URL and got all my lost images back

Two quick comments:

I've only had two times that I needed to recover photos from CF cards, and PhotoRescue did a great job each time.

Yes, Ziggy53 has been extraordinarily helpful to me in the past, too. Great guy.

photobug · May 15, 2010

(First, thanks Pathfinder, for removing that "spam" message from this thread in the last 24 hrs!)

Second, a quick update to the original (old!) thread.

I have recovered files 3 or 4 times now using PhotoRescue from DataRescue.com. The most recent was not even from a flash card ... my cousin had a 250GB hard drive fail in her laptop and PhotoRescue saved a lot of data (photos) from it for her. She replaced it with a shiny, new, faster hard drive, but due to the drive failure she couldn't read a darned thing off of the old one. Nada.

I stuck her old drive in a hard drive dock on my computer. I tried several things, including letting PhotoRescue run to extract directly from the bad drive ... but due to the read errors, it took FOREVER for it to read the drive. So what I decided to try was to make a copy on my main hard drive of the contents of the bad drive, then run PhotoRescue on that (which it could read without encountering read errors).

Here's what ended up working (on a Mac**; I used Windows for nearly 15 years but am not familiar with similar tools on Windows, although there might be some):

Using Disk Utility, I created a FAT disk image file (.dmg) on an internal system disk large enough to hold her whole bad hard drive (I think I used 260-270GB for the size, just to be sure).
I mounted the disk image (by double-clicking on it)
I copied the bad drive's contents to the to the raw disk image (/dev/rdisk7s2 in this case) using the built-in Unix disk-to-disk copy utility, "dd", using an option to ignore read errors from the source device. Due to the read errors, this copy process ran for about 24 hours.
I unmounted (Ejected) the disk image, then re-mounted (double-clicked) it.
I ran PhotoRescue on the disk image device (/dev/disk7s2). That ran for a long time ... between 24 and 48 hours, assembling a jigsaw puzzle comprised of about 500,000 pieces (disk blocks)!

In the end, it had recovered 3013 image files from a "fried" hard drive. My cousin was pretty darned happy, since she had given up hope.

Score another one for PhotoRescue!

_______
** I'm now on Mac OS X, am gradually replacing all our family's machines with Macs, and would be happy if I never had to touch Windows again. I have a long list of reasons why (I can email it if anyone cares), but w.r.t. to this data recovery operation, I have no idea how I would have pulled it off on Windows. PhotoRescue runs on both platforms, BTW.
.
.

pathfinder · May 15, 2010

Glad to hear that the images got saved.

I hate to think how many digital images are going to be lost over the coming years.

photobug · May 15, 2010

pathfinder wrote: »

I hate to think how many digital images are going to be lost over the coming years.

A *lot*. But the good news is, those lost will be a tiny fraction of the number *created*!

starlight · May 16, 2010

This is very good to hear.

So far I've only used the software that came with the Lexar cards in trial situations (to see what I'd be dealing with if it *did* happen), but it's good to know there is a tried and true solution out there if I ever have a real failure.

malch · May 16, 2010

Two days ago, my daughter handed me a SD card and said "Please can you clear this". So, I formatted the card.

She screamed: "I meant download it".

Oops.

I tried Sandisk RescuePro and it did a rather poor job. Files were split and I'd guess that half the data was lost.

Recuva is a program I've used in the past to recover deleted files from hard drives.

I tried it on this SD card and it recovered 100% of the data.

Smaller, faster, cheaper, better and highly recommended.

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

CompactFlash JPG Data Recovery software??

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