Recovering images from dat files on cd-rw...

[Selvarin]

Hello there, I'm most definitely NOT an expert on this...A sister's friend used a digital camera to photograph her son's wedding. Apparently she connected the smartdisk to the computer and burned them straight to a cd-rw, or so she says. Now she can't view the images at all, and she didn't leave a copy on the computer.

*sigh*

I really don't know what the heck she did, on the disk there's folders of the following: CDI, EXT, MPEGAV, SEGMENT, and VCD. I don't have any documentation nor do I have a copy of whatever program she used (she's out of town for a while). Can anyone tell me how to read what's on there, how to recover the images?

[jm1105]

it looks like she used some sort of program that saves/archives the images to CD or CD-RW. This essentially creates a VCD that can be viewed on a VCD 2.0 ready DVD player. Try inserting the CD-RW into a DVD player and see if there is anything there after pressing play.

also try to "explore" the CD-RW. I bet the photos are inside one of the folders. They will all have .jpeg or .jpg extensions on them.

suggestion - learn how to properly download the images from a digital camera to your hard drive BEFORE experimenting.

[Selvarin]

Thanks for the reply. As for your suggestion, if it were my digital camera, PC, etc., I would've done all of those precautionary measures. My sister's friend knows very little about these things, however, she was too keen on putting it on a disk without regard to the 'What if--oops!' factor that most of us know so well. (She also erased and rewrote the contents of the Smartdisk, brilliant of her.)

As it currently stands, it doesn't play on my DVD player. Also, none of the files are in jpeg/jpg format. That's the infuriating part, they're all in .dat format and they won't play using Windows media player (or any of the others it was suggested I use to view .dat files on vcd's). Neither will changing the file extension (to jpg, jpeg, etc.) magically make them viewable.

[James01]

How big are all the files on the CD combined?

[Selvarin]

About 42 MB. The lion's share of it is in the Segments subdirectory, 114 .dat files (344 kb each).

[James01]

Selvarin wrote:
About 42 MB. The lion's share of it is in the Segments subdirectory, 114 .dat files (344 kb each).


I had to recover images for a friend at work 2 times already. If you want I can attempt to get them for you... 42mb is small enough. No guarantee I will be able to get them but you have nothing to lose :)

Let me know how you want to get me the files, I have an FTP site if you want to upload them.

Again I dont want to build false hopes but I will do my best to help out.


James