Dead CF Card?

[yokehead]

Hi All,

Got my G3 fairly recently, and have been using a PNY 128mb card. This wasn't removed from the camera, all photo downloads to my PC were made directly from the camera & the card then formatted in the camera before the next round of shooting.
The card has died whilst in the camera & now can't be read by the camera (it won't work at all) or card reader (windows explorer locks up). The camera & reader are fine with other cards.
Question is, although it looks to me like my 80 holiday photos have gone for good, is there a chance that an expert digital lab would be able to access the card - does such a service exist?
Here's hoping, and by the way I'm in Hertfordshire, UK.

Thanks

[sdommin]

There are many such services available, though it will cost you some money. Do a Google search for "data recovery". I guess it depends on just how badly you want those photos back.

[sidebp]

Not really a recommendation - more a last resort, but....

I know some people have had success running chkdsk/scandisk on the card....

that said it doesnt particularly sound like yours has bad sectors.

Sorry, that wasnt much help was it! Maybe worth trying though

Good Luck

[malfunct]

I would really recommend pulling the card out of the camera and trying it out in a compact flash reader. That will narrow down the possibilities of what is failing a great deal.

As was suggested you might be able to run scandisk on the card at that point (compact flash for canon is formated as FAT or FAT32 so windows will understand how to deal with that).

As far as datarecovery, if the card is actually broken, I don't know that there is much option. It is possible that a contact inside the card is broken in which case they may be able to access the memory chip directly.

[Galf]

You can use BadCopy Pro is a good software and have Digital Photo Recovery and Digital Image Recovery is a little slow but works. http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/ .You can download a demo (the SAVE is disable) but you can see if the software is able to recover your information

In the topic http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=15278
there is information about another software ( free :) )

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm

Galf.

[Autumn]

Hi yokehead

I bought 4 - 256 mb cf cards recently for use with Canon Poweshot G3 cameras.

One was for my neighbour and 3 for me.

2 of my cards were OK, but the 3rd packed up about half way through when I was on a recent cruise. I had viewed the ones taken on the cabin TV and they were fine. It just suddendly packed up.

I returned from my hol, only to find that my neighbour had had the same prob on his hol. He had taken about 11. On both occasions it was the first time they had been used.

I rang the supplier Digiprint and their techies said it couldn't be a faulty card, because they can't be faulty!!!

He suggested an incompatibility with our cameras with the Firmware in the camera. (I had never heard of that before).

I have had to get our serial numbers and send them to him along with the faulty? CF cards. He will, as I understand it, download updates from the Canon site and put them on a cf card for us to put into our cameras and apparently all should be well.

He says he can recover the images.

I have tried to recover them with all the popular Recovery software, but my reader is just not recognising that anything is there.

I think I read that if I were using XP it might be able to? My OS is Win 98SE.

Our CF cards are guaranteed for 5 years.

I suggest you return yours to your supplier and see if they can recover your images.

HTH

Autumn