SDHC card help!!

[0ptics]

Hello,

So I was using my Nikon D3100 and I recently stuck in my SDHC (Lexar Professional Class 10 16gb) into my laptop and opened ViewNX, so I was just looking through my photos and decided I wanted to put all my images into one folder (for Nikon cameras, after 999 shots they make a second folder where the 1000th shot will go and so on). So I had about 400 photos in folder 1 (100D3100) and about 150 photos in folder 2 (100D3100 2) so I wanted to put all 150 photos from folder 2 into folder 1 so Ill have a total of 550 photos in folder 1. So I went to My Computer and cut the 150 photos and pasted with the other 400 photos. Then I popped out the SDHC and stuck it back into my camera but then it said "No Images". Now I was kinda worried so I decided to double check and popped in the SDHC back into the computer and opened ViewNX; again it said there were no images in the card. I then clicked My Computer and opened the SDHC from there and still no photos BUT it clearly says "7.68gb free of 14.9 gb".

So I guess I'm asking is there ANY way I could get my images back and where did they even go? All I did was just cut and paste them into one folder. I tried doing "Show hidden files" but still nothing, I'm not amazing with computers and don't know what to do...If it helps, I ALSO tried using Lightroom and Picasa 3 and still no photos in my SDHC appeared but it still states that "7.68gb free of 14.9gb"

Please! Any help would be much appreciated! I don't know if its the Lexar SDHC malfunction or something I did...
Thanks!

0ptics

 

[SCraig]

See if there is a folder on the card named "Recycle Bin" or "$Recycle" or something like that. If there is the files are probably in there and you just need to recover them from the recycle bin. I always keep it disabled on my computers but I think you just right click the folder and select "Restore Files" or something along those lines. Whatever you do, do NOT select "Empty Recycle Bin" or they will be GONE.

 

[sm4him]

99% likelihood they are still on your card. If nothing else works, you should be able to run a recovery program like recuva to retrieve the files.

 

[0ptics]

Ahhh ya the only files in the SDHC is DCIM folder and in that is "100D3100" folder but there is nothing in that...But when I right click on the DCIM folder and the "100D3100" folder and scroll down to preferences, it clearly says 0 bytes. I just don't get why it says 7.68gb free space on My Computer but once I click the SDHC there's nothing, thanks for the help though!

Should I just format and cleary my SDHC completely?

EDIT 1:

99% likelihood they are still on your card. If nothing else works, you should be able to run a recovery program like recuva to retrieve the files.

Ya hopefully, is there any other solutions that might bring them back? Also what is recuva, is it safe?

EDIT 2: so I just downloaded Recuva, hopefully it'll work

 

[SCraig]

Sounds like the files are still there somewhere, that's the only way half of the space on the card would be in use. Had they been deleted the file allocation table would have been written that the space was available and not in use. I'm not real sure what's going on but if you want to be able to recover them DO NOT format the card. If you do they will most likely be gone forever.