Unrecoverable files ?

[ottor]

No way to make this short and still get the idea across.... shot a bunch of photos on a 16 gig SanDisk Extreme CF card. That night in a motel, I ejected the card from the camera and put it in my laptop and got error msg that it couldn't recognize the card. Put the card back in the camera and got same msg. Apparently corrupted files or damaged card. Put it away for a couple of months.

Today I put it in a card reader and got the message that the card needed formatting before use, 'do I want to format the card'? - hell no. So I downloaded a freeware program called Puran File Recovery. Lo and behold, it recognized 164 photos on the card!! - I hit "Recover" and moved them from the card to a directory on my desktop computer........ they all appeared! They are all RAW files from Canon, so they're CR2 files.

So I now click on the image in the directory, and PS should open. I get the message from Photoshop that the program can't open this image as I need the most current version of ACR..... (I have the most current version - using a 7D, it's covered several versions ago anyway) .. All other CR2 image files open without that message without a problem.

Leading me to a question - is there another file conversion program that will open/convert CR2 files other than Adobe? - As it stands, I can see my images in the directory, but can't open them thru ACR. I dont' want to pay anything, as I believe the file is still corrupted, but just want to make sure. Or - if anyone else has any other suggestions, I'm all ears.

thanks,

r

 

[Derrel]

Maybe adobe's free DNG Converter will help you out, and allow you to convert the recovered files to perhaps 16-bit TIF files, or .PSD files???

ALSO, and this is from my own personal card recovery accidents...if you duplicate those 164 files, and then append the file type .TIF to the end (or perhaps .TIFF), it's possible that the images will open. I had an incident where the same basic scenario as yours unfolded in a nightmarish saga...I could NOT get the raw files I had recovered to open, but when I named them .TIF, I could open and work on them!

 

[ottor]

Did you convert the files (??) or did you just 'rename' them ? I just tried the FastStone Image program to convert them to .TIF and it dzn't recognize .CR2 files... I'll try and just rename.

 

[Derrel]

I simply re-named them. I was using a Mac OS system computer. As I understand it, Mac OS recognizes .TIF and also .TIFF: I am not 100 percent sure if Windows or Linux accept .TIFF as a file type.

I have also used the trick of simply naming duplicate raw files of various types as .JPG, which allows the embedded .JPG file inside of RAw files to be viewed: an old trick from the early 2000's, before everybody had raw image viewing capability. That old trick is where I came up with the idea of naming the recovered raw files as .TIF, to get them to open when they would not open properly with normal software that should have been able to handle the files. I had an "incident" involving some raw files,a big memory card,a very unusual afternoon with a couple of lovely ladies and a friend of mine named J. Walker, followed by an afternoon with SanDisk file recovery software, multiple passes of software combing over the memory card,etc.,etc..

Another option might be to scan the media and tell it to scan for .TIF files, OR to scan for LARGE files, above say a certain threshold size.

 

[ottor]

Just tried the DNG converter ..... the only file extension it will allow is .DNG. It asked what my source directory was and I indicated the folder on my hard drive with the recovered CR2 files.... I clicked on 'convert' and it states that there are no .CR2 files in that folder. So - the DNG converter won't recognize the file extension of CR2. I just tried to 'rename' the file to .tif and got the message "By changing the file extension, the file may become unusable - do I want to continue" ... Yes, - it renamed the file to .TIF.... Clicking on that file opens Windows Photo Viewer...the image is visible for a brief few seconds, and then it errors out ... looks like a test pattern..

So far, ... no luck.

 

[ottor]

By chance I just tried to rename to .jpg ... same results. I have a friend with a Mac - I'll take the card over to him and see if he can rename... Thanks for your ideas!

 

[ottor]

Perhaps you can't answer this without knowing exactly what the problem is, but .... do you think I would be faced with this issue if I shot RAW + Jpeg ?

 

[KmH]

Leading me to a question - is there another file conversion program that will open/convert CR2 files other than Adobe?

Canon's DPP.

 

[Vince.1551]

Yeah use Canon's software


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[Light Guru]

Perhaps you can't answer this without knowing exactly what the problem is, but .... do you think I would be faced with this issue if I shot RAW + Jpeg ?

That would not mater at all. It was the card the corrupted the files.