CF corrupt card - Lexar Pro 1000x 32GB

[Mr Bean]

Hi,
Halfway through day 2 of a holiday to Cradle Mountain (a national park in Tasmania, Australia), under trying conditions (rain and snow), my 5D3 reported an issue with the CF card (could not read it).

I discovered that the CF card would not respond to the camera. I don't have a card reader as such, as I've always left the card in the camera and downloaded images from there. The card had been in the camera for the past 3.5 years. A new CF card in the camera was picked up okay. So its a card issue. Before use on this trip, both the CF and SD cards were formatted in camera.

Suggestions for recovery? I'm in Australia, but I'm willing to look at options. As a plan B, I have a friend in Tampa, FL where there is a company (LC Technology) which appears to have a good review for recovering data.

Regards,
Nick

 

[tpatana]

There's lexar recovery tool, I'd try that but you need computer and card reader.

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi Nick.
Before I entrusted a CF card to the postal system I would buy a card reader and try it on a PC, sometimes this will work on its own, other times a bit of software like MediaRECOVER (this is for Kingston brand cards but I'm sure Lexar have something similar) will do the job.

Cheers, Graham.

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

1. If you need to recover images from the card, do not format or attempt to use it again. There are different approaches to recovering files, some first make a copy of the failed card, assuming that is even possible, and then work on the copy to attempt recovering files. Lexar has a file recovery app that runs on a computer, there are some good free ones, and some bad ones that may make things worse. Be very careful with free apps, run those on a copy of the card, they may work fine for 9 of 10 users, but I'm always number 10

Your suggestion of using a professional recovery company is a good one.

I am curious though, you have a camera with dual cards, and can write to both cards just for such a situation. Get a 64 GB SD card, and write jpeg images to it while raw are being saved to the CF card. Failures are not frequent, but they do happen, particularly on newer cards and again on older cards.

 

[Valvebounce]

Hi Mt Spokane.
Very good points, but I'd say go one further if it is a once in a lifetime holiday (or perhaps something like the recent eclipse) record Raw to both cards, there may be a slight speed penalty, but I think that came in the second the SD card was in the slot (don't know if all that was cured by a firmware update, I just remember lots of fuss over it a long time ago!).

Cheers, Graham.

1. If you need to recover images from the card, do not format or attempt to use it again. There are different approaches to recovering files, some first make a copy of the failed card, assuming that is even possible, and then work on the copy to attempt recovering files. Lexar has a file recovery app that runs on a computer, there are some good free ones, and some bad ones that may make things worse. Be very careful with free apps, run those on a copy of the card, they may work fine for 9 of 10 users, but I'm always number 10

Your suggestion of using a professional recovery company is a good one.

I am curious though, you have a camera with dual cards, and can write to both cards just for such a situation. Get a 64 GB SD card, and write jpeg images to it while raw are being saved to the CF card. Failures are not frequent, but they do happen, particularly on newer cards and again on older cards.

 

[tpatana]

I am curious though, you have a camera with dual cards, and can write to both cards just for such a situation. Get a 64 GB SD card, and write jpeg images to it while raw are being saved to the CF card. Failures are not frequent, but they do happen, particularly on newer cards and again on older cards.

Maybe I've been lucky. I think I'm somewhere around 400-500k clicks for past 10 years, and half of my cards are >5 years old. So far never lost anything.

*knock on wood*

 

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I am curious though, you have a camera with dual cards, and can write to both cards just for such a situation. Get a 64 GB SD card, and write jpeg images to it while raw are being saved to the CF card. Failures are not frequent, but they do happen, particularly on newer cards and again on older cards.

Maybe I've been lucky. I think I'm somewhere around 400-500k clicks for past 10 years, and half of my cards are >5 years old. So far never lost anything.

*knock on wood*

I doubt if it was luck, you are probably more observant and careful than you realize. Many purchase new cards in ever larger sizes which means they do not keep a card for 10 years, I don't think you did either. Even 3 years is old for a card if its used frequently.

 

[Mr Bean]

Thanks for the suggestions. While I work in an IT Support role (software), I happen to mention the issue to someone I work with (in hardware) and he apparently has a knack for extracting data from dead, or near dead devices.

So this weekend we will try that approach first, as a Plan A. There is a Plan B and C, with the professional company I contacted (here in Melbourne, Australia) towards the end of the plan (it'll cost $600-800 to extract data using their services, with a non-refundable part of about $300).

I am curious though, you have a camera with dual cards, and can write to both cards just for such a situation. Get a 64 GB SD card, and write jpeg images to it while raw are being saved to the CF card. Failures are not frequent, but they do happen, particularly on newer cards and again on older cards.

I must admit, the idea had crossed my mind, to use the CF card as the main storage, and a copy made to the SD card (I'd prefer RAW for both copies). But, as I haven't even had a corrupted image out of 10,000's, I'd become a little complacent. The current setup is to record to CF, then when it fills up (after around 800 images), to flow over to the SD card, simply because the CF card is faster. These days, I rarely shoot enough for that to happen, as I tend to pick my bursts better (mainly with wildlife, birds in flight, etc).

I'll update after the weekend, simply to let people know what resulted and how.
Cheers,
Nick

 

[privatebydesign]

I recently used this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec don't be fooled, it is a terminal command power house, it is completely free and based on a very powerful program called Testdisk.

I got it because I get thrown loads of these issues via friends, the specific lady, Denice, I got if for had an SD card in a Nikon she dropped in the ocean, unfortunately the camera was powered on and she was in the middle of taking pictures. The SD card couldn't even be read as a disc by any computer yet PhotoRec recovered 1029 images, over 300 of them were from a camera she had owned previously and the card had been formatted several times in her newer camera.

I was so impressed by that I tried it on a corrupt USB stick I had been given a year ago again with photos on it and it wasn't recognized as a device. This was complicated by the fact that the lady owner, Lydia, uses an Apple laptop running Windows, in Chinese! Anyway, sure enough PhotoRec recovered thousands of images and files (over 5,000). Once I got them off the stick I did some serious terminal commands to it, it is clearly damaged as even the most core commands can't reset it to more than a few hundred MB's even though it is a 32GB stick.

I cannot recommend PhotoRec highly enough, it is a true forensic recovery tool that is simple to use (several helpful YouTube videos) and works on any OS, Apple, Microsoft, Linux etc, best of all it is donation ware, if you don't get any results don't pay for it!

If you don't want to use the commands on your card direct there are several block level copying tools out there you can run, again free, that will make identical duplicates of your card that you can run the programs on instead, thereby negating any possibility of creating bigger issues.

P.S. I am in Orlando FL, 100 miles from Tampa, I'll do it for free if you want just give me the postage to send it back to you with all your files readable.

 

[Mr Bean]

Thanks for the info and offer privatebydesign. There's a few options to try to extract the data, which we will try on the weekend. I'll post the good, the bad or the ugly, after the weekends effort

 

[niels123]

I recently used this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec don't be fooled, it is a terminal command power house, it is completely free and based on a very powerful program called Testdisk.

I got it because I get thrown loads of these issues via friends, the specific lady, Denice, I got if for had an SD card in a Nikon she dropped in the ocean, unfortunately the camera was powered on and she was in the middle of taking pictures. The SD card couldn't even be read as a disc by any computer yet PhotoRec recovered 1029 images, over 300 of them were from a camera she had owned previously and the card had been formatted several times in her newer camera.

I was so impressed by that I tried it on a corrupt USB stick I had been given a year ago again with photos on it and it wasn't recognized as a device. This was complicated by the fact that the lady owner, Lydia, uses an Apple laptop running Windows, in Chinese! Anyway, sure enough PhotoRec recovered thousands of images and files (over 5,000). Once I got them off the stick I did some serious terminal commands to it, it is clearly damaged as even the most core commands can't reset it to more than a few hundred MB's even though it is a 32GB stick.

I cannot recommend PhotoRec highly enough, it is a true forensic recovery tool that is simple to use (several helpful YouTube videos) and works on any OS, Apple, Microsoft, Linux etc, best of all it is donation ware, if you don't get any results don't pay for it!

If you don't want to use the commands on your card direct there are several block level copying tools out there you can run, again free, that will make identical duplicates of your card that you can run the programs on instead, thereby negating any possibility of creating bigger issues.

P.S. I am in Orlando FL, 100 miles from Tampa, I'll do it for free if you want just give me the postage to send it back to you with all your files readable.

Some years ago, I accidently formatted a card and started using it again because I thought I copied all the images to my pc (which I didn't). I copied from my primary body and forgot that I didn't to my infrared body. To make matters worse, when I discovered I couldn't remember which SD card I used (at that time I had 2 x 16 GB + 1 x 32 GB).

So the first thing I did is create a disc dump file of each card (which I still have on my hard disk). I'll definitely give it a try. In case I'm stuck, would you mind to give a helping hand or a try? Perhaps, I can split up the dd files and send them via wetransfer?

Thanks!
Niels

 

[privatebydesign]

I recently used this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec don't be fooled, it is a terminal command power house, it is completely free and based on a very powerful program called Testdisk.

I got it because I get thrown loads of these issues via friends, the specific lady, Denice, I got if for had an SD card in a Nikon she dropped in the ocean, unfortunately the camera was powered on and she was in the middle of taking pictures. The SD card couldn't even be read as a disc by any computer yet PhotoRec recovered 1029 images, over 300 of them were from a camera she had owned previously and the card had been formatted several times in her newer camera.

I was so impressed by that I tried it on a corrupt USB stick I had been given a year ago again with photos on it and it wasn't recognized as a device. This was complicated by the fact that the lady owner, Lydia, uses an Apple laptop running Windows, in Chinese! Anyway, sure enough PhotoRec recovered thousands of images and files (over 5,000). Once I got them off the stick I did some serious terminal commands to it, it is clearly damaged as even the most core commands can't reset it to more than a few hundred MB's even though it is a 32GB stick.

I cannot recommend PhotoRec highly enough, it is a true forensic recovery tool that is simple to use (several helpful YouTube videos) and works on any OS, Apple, Microsoft, Linux etc, best of all it is donation ware, if you don't get any results don't pay for it!

If you don't want to use the commands on your card direct there are several block level copying tools out there you can run, again free, that will make identical duplicates of your card that you can run the programs on instead, thereby negating any possibility of creating bigger issues.

P.S. I am in Orlando FL, 100 miles from Tampa, I'll do it for free if you want just give me the postage to send it back to you with all your files readable.

Some years ago, I accidently formatted a card and started using it again because I thought I copied all the images to my pc (which I didn't). I copied from my primary body and forgot that I didn't to my infrared body. To make matters worse, when I discovered I couldn't remember which SD card I used (at that time I had 2 x 16 GB + 1 x 32 GB).

So the first thing I did is create a disc dump file of each card (which I still have on my hard disk). I'll definitely give it a try. In case I'm stuck, would you mind to give a helping hand or a try? Perhaps, I can split up the dd files and send them via wetransfer?

Thanks!
Niels

Hi Niels,

I'll happily do what I can, but I don't profess to be a professional data recovery expert, as my prices reflect .

Having said that the program I recently used looks for 'drives' so any files you have would have needed to be saved as a disc image and then I'd think the easiest way to use that is to create a new 'drive' with a USB stick from that disc image. Then Photorec will do its thing on that 'disc'.

So the key issue is did you save your old cards as disc images?

 

[niels123]

I recently used this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec don't be fooled, it is a terminal command power house, it is completely free and based on a very powerful program called Testdisk.

I got it because I get thrown loads of these issues via friends, the specific lady, Denice, I got if for had an SD card in a Nikon she dropped in the ocean, unfortunately the camera was powered on and she was in the middle of taking pictures. The SD card couldn't even be read as a disc by any computer yet PhotoRec recovered 1029 images, over 300 of them were from a camera she had owned previously and the card had been formatted several times in her newer camera.

I was so impressed by that I tried it on a corrupt USB stick I had been given a year ago again with photos on it and it wasn't recognized as a device. This was complicated by the fact that the lady owner, Lydia, uses an Apple laptop running Windows, in Chinese! Anyway, sure enough PhotoRec recovered thousands of images and files (over 5,000). Once I got them off the stick I did some serious terminal commands to it, it is clearly damaged as even the most core commands can't reset it to more than a few hundred MB's even though it is a 32GB stick.

I cannot recommend PhotoRec highly enough, it is a true forensic recovery tool that is simple to use (several helpful YouTube videos) and works on any OS, Apple, Microsoft, Linux etc, best of all it is donation ware, if you don't get any results don't pay for it!

If you don't want to use the commands on your card direct there are several block level copying tools out there you can run, again free, that will make identical duplicates of your card that you can run the programs on instead, thereby negating any possibility of creating bigger issues.

P.S. I am in Orlando FL, 100 miles from Tampa, I'll do it for free if you want just give me the postage to send it back to you with all your files readable.

Some years ago, I accidently formatted a card and started using it again because I thought I copied all the images to my pc (which I didn't). I copied from my primary body and forgot that I didn't to my infrared body. To make matters worse, when I discovered I couldn't remember which SD card I used (at that time I had 2 x 16 GB + 1 x 32 GB).

So the first thing I did is create a disc dump file of each card (which I still have on my hard disk). I'll definitely give it a try. In case I'm stuck, would you mind to give a helping hand or a try? Perhaps, I can split up the dd files and send them via wetransfer?

Thanks!
Niels

Hi Niels,

I'll happily do what I can, but I don't profess to be a professional data recovery expert, as my prices reflect .

Having said that the program I recently used looks for 'drives' so any files you have would have needed to be saved as a disc image and then I'd think the easiest way to use that is to create a new 'drive' with a USB stick from that disc image. Then Photorec will do its thing on that 'disc'.

So the key issue is did you save your old cards as disc images?

I used dd for windows, which is based on the linux dd command. It stands for disc dump and makes a binary copy of every bit of an entire volume, partition, hard drive or usb media. One doesn't need to copy the dd file back to a usb flash medium as it can be mounted with software such as OSFMount (which is freeware). It becomes available as a read-only drive then.

 

[privatebydesign]

Hi Niels,

In that case yes, I'm happy to do anything I can. Give it a go and if you need any pointers along the way I'm happy to help, or, as you say, send me the direct dumps and I'm happy to give it a go too.

The thing that really surprised me was that Photorec got files off the SD card from the previous camera after many re formats in the first instance, and in the second instance getting 15GB of files off a stick nothing else could see as more than a few hundred MB's.

 

[niels123]

Hi Niels,

In that case yes, I'm happy to do anything I can. Give it a go and if you need any pointers along the way I'm happy to help, or, as you say, send me the direct dumps and I'm happy to give it a go too.

The thing that really surprised me was that Photorec got files off the SD card from the previous camera after many re formats in the first instance, and in the second instance getting 15GB of files off a stick nothing else could see as more than a few hundred MB's.

Many Thanks! ;D Do you have a facebook account?

 

[Mr Bean]

I recently used this http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec don't be fooled, it is a terminal command power house, it is completely free and based on a very powerful program called Testdisk.

Plan A (help from my friend) didn't work. I have downloaded PhotoRec, but an issue is, the CF card can't be seen on my computer (Windows 10). So PhotoRec doesn't show the card to be worked on. Do I take it that the card is really dead?

 

[privatebydesign]

Many Thanks! ;D Do you have a facebook account?

Hi niels, I sent you a PM.

Plan A (help from my friend) didn't work. I have downloaded PhotoRec, but an issue is, the CF card can't be seen on my computer (Windows 10). So PhotoRec doesn't show the card to be worked on. Do I take it that the card is really dead?

No. I am happy to work on it for free if you send me the card.