This morning I removed the Memory Card from the camera and plugged it into the 8in1 card reader thats built into the PC and after a few seconds it showed a message "The card is not formatted do you wish to format it", Oh no whats happed to the card!!!
Its a branded SanDisk Ultra II 2Gb Compact Flash SD card and its never been a problem before so its a bit strange.
I then put the memory card back into the Nikon camera and pressed the Play button but the D70 showed "The card is not formatted" on the LCD screen. It gets worse by the second :(
I then put the memory card into my Kingston 19 in 1 Card reader
and plugged the flying USB lead into my PC, I clicked on each of the removable drives that came up but every one says "insert disk"
How to recover the lost photographs from the faulty Camera memory Card.
I have tried several programs over the years that allow you to retrieve lost files from hard disks, The software I used here seems to be the best by a long way. Beats all the others by a long way.
The software is called Active File Recovery and is free to try
Click the Download button on here http://www.file-recovery.net/ and the next blue download button to get the file which is 4.47Mb and install this. It costs £23 to register the Demo version which will allow you to actually recover the files it has found.
Above is a screen grab of the software, click it to enlarge the view so you can see it.
I put my faulty memory card into the Kingston 19 in 1 Card reader
and ran Active File Recovery, as you can see this software shows the 2Gb memory card as present.Now you select this drive by clicking on it and then click the SuperScan button at the top/left of the panel.
This will show the "SuperScan Options" panel, in my particular case I only want to recover and .JPG files on the card, so in order to speed the scan process Where it says "File types to be recognized based on signatures" I selected Some and then the Select button. This shows a screen where you can pick and choose what files you want to recover.I cleared all selections and selected just JPEG Images (*.JPG)
It will now look through the memory card for absolutely every JPG file that it can find. While it scans the card it will show you how many files its found at the bottom. At this stage it is not recovering any data, its just showing you what its found.
Once the scan is complete you can view the results by expanding the results, See the SuperScan icon on the left panel.
In my case it shows as Found Files .JPG, once you click on this it will show all the files it found in the right panel. You can now select the files you want to recover, you may as well recover all of them.
Select all the files and click the Recover button, this will retrieve the images from the card and put them into a folder that you select. If its a large memory card then it may take a few minutes to get the data from it
The Results:
This software not only managed to recover every one of the photographs I took but it also recovered hundreds of photographs that I had taken with this camera from years previous!
It just goes to show that just because you delete images and format the card over and over that all the data is still on there (as long as its not been overwritten).
Some of the photographs it recovered were taken in August 2008 and were still on the card because I had not taken "so many" photographs in a single session before so it had not overwritten that area of the card yet.
So if YOU ever have lost photographs like this then try this Active File Recovery.
Hope you found this software review of use.
Andy
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