[DEMUG] SD Camera Disk Repair

[Alex Gocze]

It sounds as though the flash memory may be failing or have failed. I've been told that most flash cards and or usb memory sticks have a limited life span. Apparently after a given number of read/write cycles the chips become no good and are no longer reliable to read or write data from. I would imagine that the card must be fairly new, so you might want to contact the manufacturer for a warranty replacement. Otherwise, I found this site:

http://www.p-dd.mobi/memory-card/memory-card.html

...which offers a number (the link is a direct one to the program for recovering from an  SD card) of software programs intended for recovering data from a flash memory device. One down side to this is that the recovery software is only available for windows. I would suspect it works within virtual pc if you're still running a power mac, or VMware/Parallels if you are running an intel mac. I think disk warrior or any other 'Mac Based' recovery software is going to be problematic on an SD card since they are almost always formatted in FAT16. If this memory card recover/repair software doesn't work perhaps some other windows based disk repair software can help the cause? 

Hope you are able to get your data back!

"Dwight M. Lanpher" <groupw at lanpherassociates.com> wrote: Dear Group:

I have a 1 GB SD Camera disk that is partially corrupt.. probably a bad
format or a bad section of memory. This disk contains the last day of a
vacation in Europe and I would very much like to recover the data.

I am able to see and copy the first 71 pictures off the card but Disk
Utility indicates that there are 512 files on the disk: Get Info indicates
817.8 Mbytes of data on the SD Card but it also indicates that the one
visible folder only has 160.2 MB of data.

Format :     MS-DOS File System (FAT16)
Capacity :   962.4 MB (1,009,128,448 Bytes)
Available :  144.3 MB (151,339,008 Bytes)
Used :         817.8 MB (857,522,176 Bytes)
Number of Files :  512

Disk Verify indicates many errors of the type:

Extend? no
/DCIM/102CANON has entries after end of directory
Truncate? no

Does anyone have suggestions for specific recovery software? I¹ve used Disk
Warrior on hard disks and think that it might be a good candidate for
recovery as it recovers the actual data files and reconstructs the
directory. 

But, I don¹t know whether Disk Warrior can deal with a SD Card. I¹m using a
PCMCIA card to read the disk and it mounts very nicely in Disk Repair.

I¹ve tried making a disk image but only the 71 files appear so I believe
that I¹m going to have to work on the actual disk and not a copy so I don¹t
want to make a mistake. I¹ll probably have only one chance to recover the
data.

Fortunately I used several cards so that I¹ve only lost one day¹s pictures.
But it would be a major expense and another trip to reshoot the pictures and
video so I would be willing to spend some money to recover the data. I
believe it¹s still there and with the right software it should be easily
restored. I would even consider sending out to a data recovery service.

Any suggestions?

---Dwight


Dwight M. Lanpher
Box 472, 1 Summit Road
Northeast Harbor, ME 04662-0472

email: groupw at lanpherassociates.com
voice: (207)276-5350, FAX:(207)276-4067




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