Error 02 - Help!

[CanonUser]

I shot a friend's wedding a couple of weeks ago using a Magicstor 2.2GB Microdrive. Beside frequent file corruptions and freezes, I managed to get a few hundred pics of the event. I did not want to deal with the problem working the files from the camera, so I waited and just got a USB2.0 card reader. I also got an RMA from the vendor but still keep the MD untill after the planned transfer to my PC. Today, the MD would not work in either the camera or the CF reader. The camera returned an "Error 02" message. The PC's File Browser, Capture1, and Canon's FVU froze upon starting because the CF reader can't read from the card! Without anything accessing the MD, the LED on the reader remained a solid green. When any software (C1, FVU, browser) started, the LED blinked red/green constantly.

What's your advice? Please help, I can't tell my friend that his pics are gone! Anything is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time and help.

Regards,
Alan

[robertwgross]

CanonUser wrote:
What's your advice? Please help, I can't tell my friend that his pics are gone!

Give me your friend's email address and I will tell him that his pics are gone.

---Bob Gross---

[CanonUser]

It'd be funny if I was not the one who is facing the dilema. Unfortunately, it's not. Due to a topic about Magicstor I started and CDS' responses in another thread, a number of other users dropped their plan to get this microdrive. I was saved from the pit of hell by other's mistakes that were posted in this forum as well. It's live and learn. In this instance, I am the one who did the "living" part and really was hoping that some seasoned pro out there can provide some idea to try. We can all learn something new.

Regards,
Alan

[Motorsports Photo]

Give Norton Utilities a try. It may be able to fix the drive and save your files. It worked for me once when I almost lost a days work!

The only drawback is the files will be renamed filexxx.chk

-Pete

[Belmondo]

I would think that the manufacturer might be able to recover your data. If the failure is hardware related, they certainly would have the means to do something about it. It it's a corruption issue, that 's a different problem, but somebody, somewhere, should be able to pull off any recoverable data.

I've been very leery of microdrives ever since I understood what they are. It seems like an unnecessry layer of potential failure (i.e. mechanical), consequently I've opted for the solid state memory cards from day one and have never been tempted to try the micro drive.

I will keep my fingers crossed for you. That's a terrible problem to have. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere out there --- my main fear is that it will be very expensive just as it is on full-size hard drives.

Good luck.

Tom

[DNHayashida]

Use at your own risk, but I remember a MicroDrive user having problems, and what he did was to put the MD in a card reader then whacked the side or top of the card reader with his hand. In his words he hit it fairly hard. He got it to spin up and he immediately transferred the pictures, then returned the MD.

Personally, I'm sticking to CF cards - no moving parts, a lot less to go wrong.

Darryl Hayashida

[samdring]

You mention picture browsers but will Windows Explorer recognise the files?

[stuartf287]

Have you tried photorescue? Check out this website:

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/


And good luck!

[CanonUser]

Thanks to all. I tried PhotoRescue. It saw the drive but reported I/O problems and can't read many sectors. It then gave me an option of checking as a physical drive, providing I know the drive and cluster size. Well, I entered 2200MB (for 2.2GB) and tried each of the 1,16,and 32K cluster. No luck yet.
Someone else pointed me to Smart Recovery. It pulled the JPG thumbnails but seems to have rpoblem seeing the RAW files. It does managed to complete a scan of the drive though I did not see the CF reader's LED blink or hear the drive making noise.
I contacted a data recovery service (swstars.com) and they were very confident in their ability to pull the files from the drive. I have problem with the quoted $200-4800 fee though. I'm communicating to see if they can provide a set of figures that better corresponds with my specific problem.
In the meanwhile, thanks to everyone. I'm still open to other ideas if you have 'em. BTW, does anyone know the cluster size Canon uses to write the files to the CF cards. Again, thanks for your time and help.

Regards,
Alan

[CyberDyneSystems]

Sorry to hear about the bad drive :(
I wonder if these MagicStore drives were marketed by the data recovery companies???


FAT 32 @ 2.2 gig SHOULD be a 2k cluster size. It looks like you used all the wrong sizes to try :)

Try 2K,. and then 4K or 8K,. 8K is the absolute largest cluster you would see.. even on a 160gig drive.. so I doubt the 16K or larger is a contender.

[CanonUser]

I'm certain now that there's a conspiracy going on! I want the X-Files (No...not the X-Drive!)

Regards,
Alan

[kidMike]

There is a definite problem with the MagicStor 2.2 MD and the Canon Digital Rebel. I bought them both, and am seriously P.O.'d! The MD works fine when you put it in; turn on the cam, it spins up to check capacity, take photos and it spins up and down to read and write.

The problem comes in when you turn the Rebel OFF! The drive spins up and continues to spin until your battery is dead!

I wrote to Canon and MagicStor, Canon's response was (in essence) "too bad". MagicStor hasn't responded.

Sucks.

kM

[jkrigney]

[quote]kidmike wrote:
"There is a definite problem with the MagicStor 2.2 MD and the Canon Digital Rebel.

The problem comes in when you turn the Rebel OFF! The drive spins up and continues to spin until your battery is dead!"

I had exactly the same result with the Rebel. Oddly enough, the Magicstor works flawlessly with my Canon G2 and my Nikon 5700 (reformatted to FAT16, of course). I tried the Magicstor back in the Rebel with FAT16. Same problem. Leads one to conclude that the problem is with the Rebel, not the Magicstor.

Has anyone tried the 2gig Hitachi in the Rebel?

JKR

[vvizard]

This isn't much of help, but for the record, I had quite a nasty drive-failure this summer. I'm doing some freelance web-development when I have time for it, and the last year I was working for this massive CMS/CRM solution for a company here in Norway. I mean, it was fairly big s*it with sms-gateway-interactions, module-based design for plugging in/out new/old necessary features when needed. This way the companies could rent just the modules they where interested in. It worked quite like all the phpnuke, postnuke, whatever, just with a lot of extra features, mostly aimed at customer-relations and other things the SOHO-market needs.

Anyways.. Development had been going on for about a year (me as the only developer, and the only one with decent copies of it). I can with confidence say there was put down 1000+ working hours from my part in it, and probably quite a bit from my boss, in making contacts with potential buyers, giving me input on what features to code in etc. He's the business guy knowing what's needed, I'm just the humble coder who make it happen..

Then one I did a incredible foolish mistake. I overwrote my partition-table. All data left intact on disk, but the partition-table was long gone, so there was no ways to recover it. Would've been easy if I only used some "normal" filesystem, but I use a filesystem called ReiserFS, laying as a logical partition within an extended. Few utilities manage to correct this error on reiserFS. I found out the wrong way :( Gpart guessed all my primary partitions. EXT2 and SWAP. It also detected the extended partition, but did not detect the logical ReiserFS-volumes in it. So I was screwed. At least the important contents of the disk.

Fortunatly I had backup, at my webhost. So I was just gonna SSH into it, tar them up, and transfer back to my workstation. Except.. I couldn't establish a ssh-connection. So I mail my webhost, and they can tell a very little pleasant story. An (hardware) error in their raid-controller had caused both the disk, and the mirror to get their partition-tables all screwed up (Murphy IS real!). This was on a BSD-system with UFS-partitions. So there I stood. Thousand of work-hours gone forever. Me definetly loosing the job, and if lucky, hopefully not getting sued by the company I developed it for. I then contacted the computer-crime "special-force" of the Norwegian police, to ask if they where up to the task. Fortunatly they wanted to try it out, since they wanted to check their luck on ReiserFS-systems. There are one heck of a good data-recovery company in norway, but their prices are so high that asking my boss to pay them would be my _VERY_ last resort.

Then after a week or so avoiding phone-calls from my boss, the webhost called. They had managed to get their disks back online.. *OH THANK GOD!* So the story turned out well, and I'm still coding on the same project, and my boss don't know anything about the incident we had =)

Sorry, off topic I know :/ But if there's anything to learn here, no matter how bad things look, they "can" be fixed :)