Archives for: March 2011, 02
March 2, 2011
Getting Pics Off A Bad Memory Card
Recently one of my online friends sent me a memory card from her camera in the hopes I might be able to recover her vacation photos. Something went screwy wackadoodles BOOM awry and all of the pics on the card weren’t there anymore. I offered to see what mojo I could dojo and with nothing to lose she put it in the mail.
[SKIP THIS PART IF TECHNOLOGY CONFUSES YOU]
See, I had done a lot of data recovery over the years on bad hard drives, CDs, DVDs, memory cards, flash/thumb drives, old pianos, circus midgets and the occasional dark elf so I was pretty confident I’d be able to recover all her images off the whacked-out/corrupted SD card.
The minute I received the card I tried it on all my computers and while they knew there was a memory card inserted, they could not read or see anything on it. 
Which is a bad thing because it meant the card was severely corrupted and inaccessible to the computers. So no amount of software I had in my data recovery arsenal would probably work. What to do? 
[KEEP ON SKIPPING NOTHING TO SEE HERE EXCEPT A PRETTY GRAPHIC I WORKED VERY HARD ON]
I wasn’t stumped or even worried. Yet. So I inserted the memory card into my digital camera and formatted it. If I could get the card to a readable state so my computers could see it, I should be able to recover the images without a problem. Most data recovery programs and techniques can easily find deleted, formatted over data. Despite several format tries, the card could still not be read by my computers.
[OK THE CONFUSING PART’S OVER]
Still not stumped but a tad intrigued, I put my digital camera on PLAY MODE, with her corrupted card inside it and an amazing thing happened. The little green thinking light went crazy and after a few seconds an image appeared. IT WAS ONE OF HER LOST PICTURES! My digital camera was able to see the card and slowly started resurrecting her wiped, corrupted pics! My camera worked on this problem for about ten minutes and after it was done all of her pictures were there - all 217 of them. Fully freaking restored?! TA-DAAAA! 
Who knew? I never saw that one before but hey, I go with anything that works. I quickly connected the camera to the computer and copied over all the restored pictures and thus, with the help of my trusty Canon Powershot A580 digital camera/new data recovery tool, my title of Miracle Worker was still in place. 
My camera saved the day, I took credit for it, somewhere where it’s cold all the time a nice lady with six children got some of her precious memories back and the world is a better place, indeed. Boo-ya! 
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