Help!! Lost photos

SydneyKate

Foolishly I let one of my kids play with my digital (Canon) camera and he managed to format the Flash card.
I heard there is some way to retrieve the photos - can nyone help?!

lotus blossom

to the best of my knowledge there is no way to recover photos from a formatted card. It essentially wipes the slate clean so to speak, like when a pc harddrive is formatted. For future reference you may consider activating the "protect" feature in the camera's menu, which will protect from accidental erasure via formatting.

sorry...

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lotus blossom

well, perhaps i am wrong. i did a google search and found this:

http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00CmDU

good luck and report back!

SydneyKate

Many thanks LB, I will certainly look into these options and let u know if I get any success!

soki

I suggest you to try the following:

insert your memory card in an external reader (my canon for example is not mounted by windows as a hard drive, so the recovery proces does not work as it have to. I have to insert the card in an external card reader in order to have the card mounted correctly)
then try a recovery software which is able to recover the file sistem you use on your media. most of the time is about FAT file syste. I would recomand you "GetDataBack" software, which is not a freeware one, but I think it works in demo mode for a while. I recovered my card several times.
I also used http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital_image_recovery.htm
which works fine sometime. Serching google for "photo recovery " can link you to other good stuffs.
And not the last: good luck !

IVAN

I know of a program that is supposed to retrieve info from flash cards.
Can't remember the name now. I have it in some magazine. Will try to find it in the next days.

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machadinha

I know nothing of digital photography, however I had to retrieve a partition on my harddisk just recently (after Partition Magic screwed up on me during an operation -- back up back up first folks!) I spent quite some time looking for recovery software, all I could find was promising-looking but expensive ware that would allow you to make a (sheer endless) analysis that at least taught me the stuff was still there but that you need to buy of course to do the actual recovery. I finally came up with this nifty piece of freeware called TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/ , and I see now it features a special photo recovery tool too! Worked excellent with me, and in a jiffy too. Be sure to go through the process a couple of times to understand what you're doing, you only finalize any changes as the last step so until you do you're safe. Making faulty changes to a disk will only make it harder to recover later. The instructions may look a little complicated but it's quite simple really once you start toying around with it.

Mind you in my case it turned out to be just a boot sector problem or what do you call it, formatting is rather more radical but it should be recoverable in theory at least. If you can't do it yourself it might turn out to be a costly operation though. As noted do not use that disk for anything else until you fix it.

Good luck.

edit: Had a quick look at Testdisk's documentation again and not so sure if it can solve accidental formatting. Wouldn't hurt to give it a try and see what it comes up with though.

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Merchant

As long as you haven't taken any more photos on the card, there is a chance you can recover the data. Many of the flash card manufacturers make recovery programs. Do you have a Lexar or Sandisk card? You can probably download the program from a website, then run it with the card in a card reader attached to your computer.

dreamsyndicate

This freeware has worked for me in the past on a formatted memory card :

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Hope it works for you ...

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machadinha

Looks promising enough! For photos they offer http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_medi...uk/welcome.htm btw. Windows only. Some other nifty tools as well from the looks of it.

For the really desperate their mother company seems to deal in professional data recovery (Europe only?), http://www.convar.com/ . Soki's link also looks like a good try btw.

IVAN

Perhaps Restoration 2,5.14. Shareware but unlimited time. Can be downloaded dfrom a varity of sites.
Never tried it but some say its good and is supposed to work on memory cards.

Or one of the Diskinternals evaluation version.

Or Google Search

SydneyKate

Hi all, just wanted to thank you for all your helpful suggestions, as you suggested I searched the internet and came up with

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/U... Recovery.html

It is freeware, I downloaded it and it worked a treat, recovered all 156 lost images very easily despite the fact the disk had been formatted!!

Thanks again for your suggestions
Kate

crimsonriver

@Sydney - Thnx! This little piece of s/w wud sure be useful....

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