2016-08-25

Hi all,

I've been pretty lucky to date and have not had an issue with memory cards until now. My 64 GB Sandisk extreme pro SDHC card (95MB/s) is on the fritz now. Of course it happens on a trip and the photos are important. What happened was something went wrong when transferring files from my K3 to my laptop. The transfer locked up and then the card was no longer readable. I'm guessing the file structure got screwed up from what I have read. I have tried several cameras and computers and Os's with the card and the same thing happens... I get a message that it needs to be formatted. I shoot hi res Jpgs and Raw (DNG files) at the same time. I tried several recovery programs and have gotten to the point where I have been able to recover my Jpgs and Raw now but for finding ones that can do both was a challenge.. Most "free" software scan for free but charge to recover.

heres What I tried...
Stellar phoenix...http://www.stellarinfo.com/ only could find the jpgs.. paid software ..cost $99

Zar X, http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.aspx

Windows XP to Windows 10, Windows Server from 2003 to 2012 R2.

Additional media to recover data to (never save files to the volume you are recovering, for this may cause further damage to the volume!)

Damaged drive must be physically functional. It should be at least detected by BIOS. Multiple bad sectors can be handled (but the data they contained is lost forever), but controller failures are beyond any software repair.

Supported filesystems:

FAT16 and FAT32

NTFS

ext2/3/4 series (Linux, used in NAS devices)

XFS (Linux, used in NAS devices)

Digital image recovery function operates regardless of the filesystem type.

Supported RAID layouts:

RAID0, RAID10, and RAID5 with any number of member disks.

It is possible to recover Windows Server software RAID0 and RAID5 if the RAID members occupy the entire physical disk.

There are the following limitations in the demo version of ZAR X:

Only (up to) four folders can be recovered in the demo version of our data recovery software.

The demo version is unable to load the scan result file. However, it does save these files to avoid having to rescan the disk when you got the full version.

In digital image recovery mode program operates as freeware with no functional limitations. List of known compatible digital camera models and image formats is available at the known camera compatibility list.

Free scan.. Cost $69.95 to recover

CardRecovery Pro https://www.cardrecovery.com/
https://www.cardrecovery.com/

Free scan, was able to find all my files, jpg and DNG raw.. cost $39.95 to recover the files.

Quote:

CardRecovery Features

Recover deleted photos from memory cards

Recover lost photos from memory cards

Recover lost movies from memory cards

Recover photos from formatted memory cards

Recover photos from damaged, unreadable or defective memory cards

Recover pictures from removable storage including flash drives

Recover images, video files from mobile phones

Supported Storage

Secure Digital card, SD card, SDHC, miniSD, MicroSD (TransFlash) card recovery

Compact Flash card, CF Type I, Type II, MicroDrive, CF card recovery

Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Duo, Pro-HG, XC, Micro(M2) recovery

MultiMedia card, MMC card recovery, XQD card, Sony XQD card

SmartMedia, flash card recovery, xD Picture card recovery

Cellular phone, mobile phone memory card and digital media recovery

MicroSD or MicroSDHC card used by Android smart phone

USB flash drive, thumb drive photo and video recovery

Supported Situations

Photos deleted accidentally or intentionally from memory cards

Photo loss due to formatting or "Delete All" operation

Memory card error or damage, or inaccessible memory card

Corruption due to the card being pulled out while your camera is on

Damage due to turning your camera off during a write/read process

Data corruption due to critical areas damage e.g. FAT, ROOT, BOOT area damage

Data loss due to using between different cameras/computers/devices

Other events that could cause damage to data

Supported Photo/Video File Types

Common Picture Formats: JPG JPEG TIF

Common Video Formats: AVI MPG MOV MPEG ASF MP4 3GP MTS

Common Audio Formats: WAV MP3 AMR

RAW Image Formats: Nikon NEF, Canon CRW and CR2, Kodak DCR, Konica Minolta MRW, Fuji RAF, Sigma X3F, Sony SRF, Samsung DNG, Pentax PEF, Olympus ORF, Leica DNG, Panasonic RAW and more

Supported Camera and Phone Brands

Nikon, Canon, Kodak, FujiFilm, Casio, Olympus, Sony, SamSung, Panasonic

Fuji, Konica-Minolta, GoPro, NEC, Imation, Sanyo, Epson, Ricoh, Pentax

LG, SHARP, Lexar, Mitsubishi, JVC, Leica, HP, Toshiba, SanDisk, Lumix

Polaroid, Sigma and almost all digital camera brands in the market

Android, BlackBerry and other smartphones (excluding iPhone) in the market

Android mobile phones including Samsung, Nexus, HTC, Motorola DROID and more

Supported Flash Memory Card Manufacturers

SanDisk, Kingston, KingMax, Sony, Lexar, PNY, PQI, Toshiba, Panasonic

FujiFilm, Samsung, Canon, Qmemory, Transcend, Apacer, PRETEC, HITACHI

Olympus, SimpleTech, Viking, OCZ Flash Media, ATP, Delkin Devices, A-Data

and almost all digital camera memory card brands in the market

Though I hate the idea of having to shell out funds for this. Its a good option.

EaseUs Data Recovery http://www.easeus.com/data-recovery/...y-freeware.htm

again free scan, and some free recovery ts free to try but only recovers 500 Mb, you can get another 1.5 Gb if you share it on social media. It does work great. I had it scan the Flash card and it found everything.. I recovered a few files as a test....both jpg,DNG, and even a vid clip worked. To recover the whole flash card is $69.95

RecoveRx.. by Transend. http://www.transcend-info.com/Support/Software-4/ it was suggested to me by someone thats used it successfully. gave it a try unfortunately I ran into issues.. For some reason it didn't find my .jpg Files at all... It found my Raw, but doesn't support .DNG? (not listed), though it lists .PEF so it converted them to .Tiff Files? I think . Hard to tell as when I open one..Its tiny even though it has 30MB of data. I had other software I tried do this as well. The software does list Cannon,Nikon,Olympus,Panasonic, and contax Raw, but no .DNG , and just lumps .PEF in which a bunch of others that it calls Tiffs. It is Free and may be worth while for someone to try ...It didn't help me and my pentax.

Lastly
Photo-rec. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

which is availible for both windows and Linux (in Linux, look for "testDisk" in your package manager)

I tried this twice... first time didn't work, but second time it worked well. I was able to recover everything using it, and it really is free.

Quote:

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.

PhotoRec is free - this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU General Public License (GPLV v2+). PhotoRec is a companion program to TestDisk, an application for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety of file systems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. You can download them from this link.

For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or memory card you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As soon as a picture or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any missing, do NOT save any more pictures or files to that memory device or hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This means that while using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

Contents

1 Operating systems

2 File systems

3 Media

4 Known file formats

5 How PhotoRec works

6 Other topics

7 Problems?

Operating systems

PhotoRec runs under

DOS/Windows 9x

Windows NT 4/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7/10

Linux

FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD

Sun Solaris

Mac OS X

and can be compiled on almost every Unix system.

Download.png Download TestDisk & PhotoRec

File systems

PhotoRec ignores the file system; this way it works even if the file system is severely damaged.

It can recover lost files from at least

FAT

NTFS

exFAT

ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem

HFS+

ReiserFS includes some special optimizations centered around tails, a name for files and end portions of files that are smaller than a filesystem block. In order to increase performance, ReiserFS is able to store files inside the b*tree leaf nodes themselves, rather than storing the data somewhere else on the disk and pointing to it. Unfortunately, PhotoRec isn't able to deal with this - that's why it doesn't work well with ReiserFS.

Media

PhotoRec works with hard disks, CD-ROMs, memory cards (CompactFlash, Memory Stick, Secure Digital/SD, SmartMedia, Microdrive, MMC, etc.), USB memory drives, DD raw image, EnCase E01 image, etc.

PhotoRec has been successfully tested with various portable media players including iPod and the following Digital Cameras:

Canon EOS 60D, 300D, 10D

Casio Exilim EX-Z 750

Fujifilm X-T10

HP PhotoSmart 620, 850, 935

Nikon CoolPix 775, 950, 5700

Olympus C350N, C860L, Mju 400 Digital, Stylus 300

Sony Alpha DSLR, DSC-P9, NEX-6

Pentax K20D

Praktica DCZ-3.4

Known file formats

PhotoRec searches for known file headers. If there is no data fragmentation, which is often the case, it can recover the whole file. PhotoRec recognizes and recovers numerous file formats including ZIP, Office, PDF, HTML, JPEG and various graphics file formats. The whole list of file formats recovered by PhotoRec contains more than 480 file extensions (about 300 file families).

Want to know if PhotoRec can recover your files ? Upload a sample file via the PhotoRec online checker (BETA).

How PhotoRec works

FAT, NTFS, ext2/ext3/ext4 file systems store files in data blocks (also called clusters under Windows). The cluster or block size remains at a constant number of sectors after being initialized during the formatting of the file system. In general, most operating systems try to store the data in a contiguous way so as to minimize data fragmentation. The seek time of mechanical drives is significant for writing and reading data to/from a hard disk, so that's why it's important to keep the fragmentation to a minimum level.

When a file is deleted, the meta-information about this file (file name, date/time, size, location of the first data block/cluster, etc.) is lost; for example, in an ext3/ext4 file system, the names of deleted files are still present, but the location of the first data block is removed. This means the data is still present on the file system, but only until some or all of it is overwritten by new file data.

To recover these lost files, PhotoRec first tries to find the data block (or cluster) size. If the file system is not corrupted, this value can be read from the superblock (ext2/ext3/ext4) or volume boot record (FAT, NTFS). Otherwise, PhotoRec reads the media, sector by sector, searching for the first ten files, from which it calculates the block/cluster size from their locations. Once this block size is known, PhotoRec reads the media block by block (or cluster by cluster). Each block is checked against a signature database which comes with the program and has grown in the type of files it can recover ever since PhotoRec's first version came out.

For example, PhotoRec identifies a JPEG file when a block begins with:

0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xe0

0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xe1

or 0xff, 0xd8, 0xff, 0xfe

If PhotoRec has already started to recover a file, it stops its recovery, checks the consistency of the file when possible and starts to save the new file (which it determined from the signature it found).

If the data is not fragmented, the recovered file should be either identical to or larger than the original file in size. In some cases, PhotoRec can learn the original file size from the file header, so the recovered file is truncated to the correct size. If, however, the recovered file ends up being smaller than its header specifies, it is discarded. Some files, such as *.MP3 types, are data streams. In this case, PhotoRec parses the recovered data, then stops the recovery when the stream ends.

When a file is recovered successfully, PhotoRec checks the previous data blocks to see if a file signature was found but the file wasn't able to be successfully recovered (that is, the file was too small), and it tries again. This way, some fragmented files can be successfully recovered.

Hope this was informative to some of you. If anyone has used any other SD card recovery software. Please share it here.

Thanks,

al

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