Cash machine horror, ATM screen shows Windows is shutting down message while it has my debit card.

Last week I had a nightmare incident when using a cash machine in Derby. Has anyone else ever had this problem, its not very nice. It just shows you how its important not to trust your life with these machines.
Its kinda funny looking back on it now, I wish I had videoed the bloody thing doing what it did.


I have been using many cash machines (ATMs) for over 20 years all over the world (well USA, Jersey, Ireland and UK :)) and never had any problems with any of them until this.

The story:

Basically I put my debit card in, entered the PIN then pressed the button “Cash with advice slip”. After a few seconds it showed a message on screen “We are currently unable to print an advice slip, do you want to continue?”

So I pressed the YES button, then it asked how much money and I pressed the £50 button but it did not respond at all. I thought perhaps the button was faulty so pressed £50 a bit harder but still nothing.

Mmmm perhaps it can’t dispense £50 due to lack of certain back notes (even though it would normally tell you so). I pressed the £40 button but still nothing so then pressed the £10 button and still no response from it.

OK I thought this ATM is knackered so I pressed the Cancel button expecting it to eject my card so I could try another ATM, but to my horror the Cancel button was not doing anything either!
Pressed Cancel a few more times, then to my surprise the ATM screen suddenly had a mouse pointer on it and a DOS popup window appeared which said “McAfee automatic update in progress”. What on earth is happening here looks like a virus scanner is updating which has stopped the actual operation of the cash machine, surely not?

Once it had done some updating of files that window vanished off screen and it said “Windows is shutting down” My God I whats going on. Windows running the ATM!!!

Then after bit it showed PC BIOS initialising messages and then Windows NT is starting up messages.

Obviously while all of this was going on, in the back of your mind you are thinking what’s going to happen to my card, Will I ever see it again?

After it had finished booting Windows NT the screen changed to ”Sorry Temporarily out of service”. See my photo here:

So that’s the end of the card then, I went into the bank that the ATM was attached to and had to queue for ages only to be told that “we do not have access to the machine and any cards that are not ejected get automatically shredded by the machine. You will have to contact your own back to get a replacement card”.

After ringing up my bank and putting a block on the lost card (just in case) I had to ask for a replacement card to be sent. My bank also said that ATMs automatically shred cards that don’t get ejected out which sounds a bit odd.

So the moral of the story is make sure you have an emergency credit card just in case Windows throws a wobbler on your ATM and decides its going to eat your card for dinner!

Until this happened I did not realise that cash machines actually ran Windows operating system, scary isn’t it ! but I guess its cheaper to use an off the shelf operating system.
Surely it was not really McAfee anti-virus software updating that killed the cash Machine? Why would you have antivirus software running on a ATM anyway its not like its got any user-accessible USB ports that people can get to infect it via!

Anyone who works at NCR able to give feedback on this?

Hope you found this story funny
Andy

How to recover photographs from a corrupted or formatted memory card using Active File Recovery.

On friday I visited Blackbrook Zoological Farm and took lots of photographs of all the thousands of birds their with my Nikon D70.
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