SD camera card & recovery options??? [Solved]

[daveinuk]

Hello folks

A work colleague has had a bit of a disaster with an SD camera memory card and it no longer appears to be able to hold or view a picture on the camera. It just seems to have died all of a sudden. (it's also full of her pictures)
Attaching it to a win xp pc, it shows as a device but is not accessable and stops you with an input/output error message.

I'm thinking the card's totally capput?????

Tried putting it in a card reader and plugging it into my laptop running mint 12, it shows up as mass storage device but is also not accessable . . .. . before I give up copletely
are there any nifty bits of linux software worth trying first that might recover her piccies or is the inability to access it non negotiable :0

Thanks in advance . . . . . . .

Dave

[xenopeek]

PhotoRec and TestDisk were made to recover files from damaged file systems. See here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/

[daveinuk]

Many thanks Vincent I'd had another search around after posting and got the impression photorec was a definite to try and I believe it's available through the software manager so I'll have a look later when I've finished work and try that out. Cheers

[daveinuk]

Hmmmm not looking good, it's not even showing up. all I get is the hard disk . . . .

Any more suggestions at all ???


Dave

[daveinuk]

Well I salvaged some . . . . . turned out the USB reader I was using wasn't too good and upon trying a different reader I then got the stick to be recognised.
I can access some but not all of the images and it was stopping me copying them over on certain images (using copy/paste), but some I could view in image viewer and I tried saving one and it worked.
I'll try photorec again tonight first now that I can get the stick to mount and see if that works, otherwise it looks like I'll have to try opening/saving them one at a time?

I think the card must be well on its way to failing as one or two of the images I opened only had like a bit of sky at the top of the picture and the rest must have been unreadable so
I'm figuring there are corrupt sectors on it or something, I got a prompt to skip while trying to copy/paste but it hung when i attempted to use the skip function.

Any other suggestions out there feel free to throw them in for a try later

[xenopeek]

I think trying PhotoRec is the best option. Have you seen their step-by-step guide? http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

They also have a forum, should you want specific help/advice for PhotoRec: http://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/

[daveinuk]

Thanks Vincent I did see the guide although I couldn't use it as it only detected my hda so I couldn't go any further. Need to try the card in my decent USB adaptor that I forgot I had , think it doubles up for HDDs and cards if I remember rightly, I'll be looking shortly. See what I can do from there, not very fluent in the terminal, still very much a beginner on that score but I'll certainly have a bash! Thanks for the replies

[daveinuk]

I am pleased to report a job well done

Recovered 229 out of 235 photo's, my colleague will be very pleased to say the least, holiday photo memories are secure !

They are now copied to a spare USB stick and will be delivered later along with my speech (yet again) about backing up to photobucket or similar, maybe the lesson learned
this time will get that home . . . . . .

I can fully endorse photorec as an easy to use command line program that wasn't half as complicated as I imagined. Once the USB was able to be recognised it was simply a case of choosing the right drive (easy when one's 120g and one's 4g lol) I then chose 'media' as the search/recovery option, then it rattled away for 15 mins or so and came to a halt having saved all files to a folder in home for me . . . . . . my kind of program

I will mark me as 'solved' . . . . .

many thanks

Dave

[xenopeek]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the program. Good job