Cf card failure - need suggestions.

Before anyone asks, I did a search already. I found loads of people with this problem, but none of the suggestions that worked for them helped for me. I had a CF card (lexar professional) with 15 gigs of images on it fail on me. First time since I started shooting has this ever happened. It says "You need to format drive H: before you can use it" when I insert the CF card reader into the usb slot. If I do that, I lose the files.

I've tried five pieces of recovery software, including lexar's version, 4 don't work and 1 seemed to pull out 256 files...but they won't open in photoshop or bridge. Say the file is a read only file and can't be opened, or is read only.


Thoughts?

Does the camera read it?

Nope. It did a couple of nights ago..but now when I switch it on it gives me an error that the card needs to be formatted before used. It won't even shoot. 5D mark II

A woman at work had that on a Lexar SD card. I was able to get all the files off (and some taken months ago that had been deleted) with SanDisk's Recovery Pro.

If you've already tried this, I'm probably of no use.

Karl Johnston wrote in post #16372889
. . . Say the file is a read only file and can't be opened, or is read only . . .

I suspect you already tried opening file properties and removing the read only attribute. If not, it would be worth a try.

Wait, if the file is read only and you are reading it, what's the problem?

You might try re-formatting the card first. This will of course smash the FAT table and you will lose all links to the files there, but once formatted it might start behaving normally and then you can use the recovery software to get the files back.

I had this happen a while back and tried a number of different recovery programs before I found one that worked.

Dr Lazarus wrote in post #16372941
A woman at work had that on a Lexar SD card. I was able to get all the files off (and some taken months ago that had been deleted) with SanDisk's Recovery Pro.

If you've already tried this, I'm probably of no use.

Thanks doc, this worked. It cost me 60 $ and the license code didn't send right away but after e-mailing customer support they sent me a new one.

It took me all day, several hours and multiple scans , sometimes it would only pick up 30 ..other times 80...then nothing...then 200...then the best I ever got out of it was 325..then only 200 something of them actually successfully recovered.

It would "recover" files and then when they showed up in the folder they would be 0 bytes or "document is wrong format/read only " according to image viewer, photoshop and bridge (this answers other question)

But yeah I think this is the best I'm going to get outta it. Thanks !

Lexar's software (4) didn't work half as well oddly enough...and I couldn't figure out where to put the activation code past the demo.

Good to hear. I've had the same experience with SD RP. I usually just do the 'all files' option rather than images. That was the option I chose when working on that SD card; and I got 20GB of files off a 16GB card...go figure that one out.

gjl711 wrote in post #16373139
You might try re-formatting the card first. This will of course smash the FAT table and you will lose all links to the files there, but once formatted it might start behaving normally and then you can use the recovery software to get the files back.

Agreed. I had a similar problem once and none of the recovery software would work. As a last resort I quick formatted the card and ran the software again, and I managed to recover every file. They didn't recover as IMG_XXXX.CR2 though. I think they had a .DAT extension and I had to manually change the names, which was a pain, but they all loaded perfectly into Lightroom and I never had any issues processing them. Needless to say the card was never used again.

Format then fingers crossed recovery program. I've done this a few times once for me a a few times for others with mixed results. Best of luck to you.

Karl Johnston wrote in post #16374650
Thanks doc, this worked. It cost me 60 $ and the license code didn't send right away but after e-mailing customer support they sent me a new one.

It took me all day, several hours and multiple scans , sometimes it would only pick up 30 ..other times 80...then nothing...then 200...then the best I ever got out of it was 325..then only 200 something of them actually successfully recovered.

It would "recover" files and then when they showed up in the folder they would be 0 bytes or "document is wrong format/read only " according to image viewer, photoshop and bridge (this answers other question)

But yeah I think this is the best I'm going to get outta it. Thanks !

Lexar's software (4) didn't work half as well oddly enough...and I couldn't figure out where to put the activation code past the demo.

So ... it worked, or it didn't work? Or it worked for about 200 photos, but you lost the rest?

I wonder if - as a very last resort - you did a quick-format as suggested above, and tried again, maybe one of the recovery programs would work any better.

Dr Lazarus wrote in post #16375216
Good to hear. I've had the same experience with SD RP. I usually just do the 'all files' option rather than images. That was the option I chose when working on that SD card; and I got 20GB of files off a 16GB card...go figure that one out.

Different sector sizes on the SD card and the computer. Very normal.

evo5ive wrote in post #16375265
Agreed. I had a similar problem once and none of the recovery software would work. As a last resort I quick formatted the card and ran the software again, and I managed to recover every file. They didn't recover as IMG_XXXX.CR2 though. I think they had a .DAT extension and I had to manually change the names, which was a pain, but they all loaded perfectly into Lightroom and I never had any issues processing them. Needless to say the card was never used again.

This is an important note, recovery software may save the files with a different extension -- it happened to me the one and only time I had a card fail, but like the above post, once I renamed the files/extensions, everything was recovered and fine.

Dr Lazarus wrote in post #16375216
Good to hear. I've had the same experience with SD RP. I usually just do the 'all files' option rather than images. That was the option I chose when working on that SD card; and I got 20GB of files off a 16GB card...go figure that one out.

20droger wrote in post #16375468
Different sector sizes on the SD card and the computer. Very normal.

Another likely cause of this is what has been reported, that recovery software can pick up old images...who knows?