oh man, I'm in a bad way...

[billybrown66]

sorry to start off my first post with such a silly amatuer question, but i messed up pretty bad today. i helped my friend shoot a film in michigan and she was documenting the shoot with her digital canon. when we got home today i was screwing around with her camera and formatted her memory card. needless to say she is pretty upset because she lives off of her pictures and i need some help with recovering them. i have been online for the past 2 hours+ trying to find a program that recovers lost media. i found a free trial of "photorescue" and decided to test it out on my canon a95, so i saved all my pictures to my computer and formated my a95, however....photoresue does NOT seem to recognize my memory card which is a 265mb compact flash. i read that i may need a "cf reader" for anytype of recovery program to run successfully. please help me in anyway, its one thing if it was myself, but this is my friend and i feel like punching myself in the face.

anykind of program (preferably freeware, i am a college student) that can help me out of this jam. thank you all. its dark...and hell is hot.

[rssfhs]

Get a CF card reader. They're cheap and much faster than transferring directly from your camera anyway. You can download some recovery programs here too: http://www.snapfiles.com/Shareware/system/swdatarecovery.html
Good luck with recovering those photos!

[billybrown66]

thanks for the link...though what i'm asking is, do i need a cf card reader for a recovery program to recognize my cf card? ive tried running "photorescue" several times, but it doesnt seem to search my cf card, infact i have no idea what it is searching. for example, this is the procedure i have going throuh....

1. start the program
2. window opens and i need to select from the following input types...logical, physical and file, i have been choosing physical.
3.now a smaller window box opens which reads: "drive 2 (0)"
4.i click ok
5. for card size i choose 256mb
6. for cluster size i choose 64kb, though i dont know what a cluster size is
7. i click ok...then it seems like it is searching through my harddrive yet i get NO results.

is anyone familiar with this program? is there something i am missing?

[Citizensmith]

If its a Canon camera then yes you do need a reader. I've seen some Olympus and HP P&S cameras that actually mount as a USB drive when you plug them in. Canon does not which is why the software isn't recognizing it. A CF card reader will set you back around $10.

On the positive side, if the card has not been used since you formatted, and you figure out how to use whichever data recovery software you chose, you will highly probably be able to recover 100% of the images. Decent memory card recovery software can be had for around $30.

[billybrown66]

thanks. i went out to best buy and bought a cf reader. does anyone one have a link to the BEST freeware digital recovery program? ive already spent 20 bucks dont feel like spending another 30, thanks for the help canon people.

[billybrown66]

...i just used picajet fx, i think it solved my problems.

[mike j]

I've used a free utility called 'Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery' to recover accidentally deleted images, in conjunction with a card reader.

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

In theory, it should be able to recover images from any part of a disc (hard drive, CF card etc) that hasn't been physically overwritten with other data.

I actually tried it on a CF card that I had reformatted in my IXUS400 and it recovered hundreds of photos !

Might be worth a shot ? You've got nothing to lose !