Memory Card Error and Lost Photos!

[MLeeK]

One of the guys here pointed me in the way of Recuva which recovered everything and more off my crashed external hard drive. Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download which worked when nothing else would.
If that still doesn't work I have another program and a free code somewhere I'll find for you to download it.

Next lesson here: Always use smaller memory cards that don't hold a TON of images and use many of them. If one does have a total catastrophic fail, you aren't out everything. ALWAYS empty your memory cards often-don't leave it in your camera to shoot for days at a time.

 

[bazooka]

PhotoRec is excellent. It can recover RAW files but I have not used it for this. Not sure why it didn't work for you.

For the videos that aren't playing... try downloading VLC. VideoLAN - Official page for VLC media player, the Open Source video framework! This will play almost any kind of video or audio file.

 

[djacobox372]

There are a ton of free file recovery programs, try download.com, one of them is bound to work.

Also u may want to try starting the program u have by right clicking on the icon and choosing "run as administrator," most file system programs require this to work on win7.

Dont worry u havent lost your all your photos, nothing is ever really deleted, even if u format. All deleting/format does is give permission to overwrite those areas of the card, so if u havent used the card since the photos are still there and recoverable.

 

[Austin Greene]

UPDATE: I found a free program called PhotoRec (PhotoRec - CGSecurity). I ran it and it seemed to recover most of the JPEGS and videos. It didn't recover any of the RAW files and when I tried to play the videos they wouldn't play. I decided to spend the $40 for CardRecovery because I wanted to try and get the videos and RAW files. I was able to recover the RAW files, but the videos had the same problem, they wouldn't play. But now I have customer service at CardRecovery that I can get info from. And the $40 is for the program so anytime this happens again I don't have to search for a solution. I'll probably be buying other brands of memory cards anyway. I haven't heard back from Transcend yet.

I have used PhotoRec and was going to suggest it, so I am glad you found it. Look in the options for what file extensions you want it to search for, and then select the raw extension. I have had no problems in the past recovering videos or photos, just make sure you are giving it the correct extensions to search for if you try it again.

Toga