When it goes wrong! The Card corrupts the files! HELP!!!

[tived]

Hi guys,

Just got back from a little trip, I had double of everything, had extra cards, using two Canon 1D's MKIII & MKIV with dual card slots, CF & SD (about 60GB of each).

Everything was sweet, until I looked at my screen after having taken well 1000's shots, and I got a can't display preview or something to that extend.

Opened up the card slots and looked in, two cards OK!, pulled one out and pressed the preview; NO IMAGES! cold sweat instantly! Arrh, open the other card up and there it was again
can't preview images, scrolled through the card fast, and this went on for some time, only 300+ of the 1300+ images had previews, 961 images, have their complete image size, time stamp (total of 17.81GB)

I had forgotten to set the write to both cards - arrh, i am pulling my hair out, what ever is left. I NEED YOUR HELP!!!! not with the hair, but how do I recover this?

this was shot with the Canon 1D Mk IV using a Kingston SD4/32GB (maybe I should have known better and used Sandisk/Lexar ?

does anyone have a solution to this please!!!

Henrik

[sniper]

You could try a card recovery program, I have used these to recover images from formatted cards in the past, that said I suspect it depends on whats gone wrong, if you can't read or write to the card it may need expert recovery (not cheap)

[langier]

Take a breath.

They are probably still on the cards. Don't reformat, erase or do anything else to them!

Download a program called PhotoRescue (both Mac and PC). You can try it to see if it will recover the files. If it show the thumbnails of your images, then you are fine and you'll need to purchase a license, about $30. and worth ten times that, IMO. PhotoRescue seems to work and get the photos when little else seems to work.

PhotoRescue will usually find your photos and allow you to download them to your computer. If it can't do it, DriveSavers is next on the list, though the images better be priceless since they are pretty pricey when it comes to recovery.

HTH, good luck!

[francois]

Another vote for PhotoRescue: http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/index.htm

[PierreVandevenne]

Thanks for your kind words about PhotoRescue. Just a quick warning which may be useful to others here (I don't ever use boards to promote PR):  since September, more than half our tech support cases have been about 32GB cards. They seem to be failing at a much higher rate than other cards. This wouldn't be the first time the high-end capacity range suffers from growing pains (firmware issues, compatibility issues...). In most cases, we _can't_ solve the issue.

My standard recommendation is, at any given time, to use a couple of cards that are one/two generations behind the top range rather than a single larger card.

[francois]

Thanks for your kind words about PhotoRescue. Just a quick warning which may be useful to others here (I don't ever use boards to promote PR):  since September, more than half our tech support cases have been about 32GB cards. They seem to be failing at a much higher rate than other cards. This wouldn't be the first time the high-end capacity range suffers from growing pains (firmware issues, compatibility issues...). In most cases, we _can't_ solve the issue.

My standard recommendation is, at any given time, to use a couple of cards that are one/two generations behind the top range rather than a single larger card.

Pierre,
Thanks a million for the recommendation about 32GB cards. We wanted to purchase new cards and your warning came at the right time. We'll stick with 16GB.