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Getting Pics Off A Bad Memory Card
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! 
17 comments
A camera can do that?! Seriously? Had no clue a digital camera can restore messed up pics gotta hand it to you that was VERY creative! Writing that one down you da man! 
Apparently the error-checking in my camera for this instance could detect the structure of the card, even though it was corrupted and afterwards find and re-assemble the picture data. Pretty much all digital images from electronic devices go to the Digital Camera Images directory (or DCIM for short) so I'm guessing from this incident that the camera saw the card was corrupted, managed to see into the DCIM folder and restore the pictures. It couldn't fix the corruption on the card, just figure a way around it as I still could not see the card, or pictures on my computers. I could only see them in the camera, thanks to it's wildly surprising error-checking and only through connecting the camera could I copy the restored pictures.
In short, got a corrupt memory card? Pics go missing? Try it in a bunch of other digital cameras and see what happens; you might get lucky like I did.
In point of fact, this trick might work on phones that take pictures and other digital devices that take pics or display pics like digital picture frames - as long as the card will fit, try it and see! You've got nothing to lose!
You heard it here first, peeps. Give props if you use this trick to who told you about it. 'kay?
Using a different camera? That's one cool cam you got there!
There was never a box to think outside of. Ask any decent troubleshooter and they'll tell you the same thing. Basic 101.
Not to say I wasn't surprised when using a different digital camera to see the corrupted pics from another camera worked. My thinking was this - a digital camera is not a computer and therefore might be able to see what a card reader can't. All cameras have some sort of error checking, if I passed it through enough cameras I'm sure one would have eventually worked unless the corruption was too great or the card was dead.
You never know for sure something new will or won't work unless you try. So try. You've got nothing to lose and knowledge to gain!
Ducks need not apply. Or duck lovers.
In short: I'm may be, but I'm not for, quackers.
PS. Star Wars is wanna-be Apple of Trek.
The splitting up of the last Harry Potter movie to extend the money train pretty much caused me seizures though. Shame shame shame.
Let's go out... to the movies... let's go out... to the mo-ovies... let's go out to the MOOVIES and get ourselves a snack!
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