Image recovery

Coming back for a couple of days in Rome and a full memory card in my Pentax DS *ist camera, the first thing I do is, of cause, to copy the files to my computer and look though them .

Except that I got an error half way through the copy process.

This has happened before, but a re-insertion of the memory card (in my card reader) solved that problem and I didn’t think more about it. But now it happened again, with still about 46 images not copied of the card. Firstly I try the windows dick checker (right click on the drive->properties->tools), xcopy, xxcopy and Pc Inspector Smart Recovery which I’ve used for this before. Non of this worked. I’ve used the Inspector for this before and it worked really well, but this was with jpeg files and this is Pentax Raw files (.pef). Didn’t find anything.

So I try:

  • DiskInternal Flash Recovery:  Finds nine images, but can’t display them, and thinks they are jpeg. Probably found bit and pieces of the internal jpeg preview in some of the files. Does claim Raw support but doesn’t mention Pentax, so… I guess they don’t over sell.
  • PC Inspector Smart Recovery: Doesn’t claim to support Pentax, and didn’t find anything.
  • CardRecovery: This claims Pentax PEF support, but didn’t find anything at all.
  • TransPict Recovery Pro: This program also claim to support Pentax Raw files, but doesn’t say which Pentax cameras. It did find all the files but couldn’t display any of them and claimed that they where probably incomplete. Locked up hard, halfway through.

So TransPict wouldn’t respond, so I decided to reboot my computer. But I forgot to remove the memory card while doing this, and windows actually picked up on the fact that there was a problem with this drive. And fixed it!.

There where two bad blocks on the sd-card, and window fixed this as good as it could. There are errors in the two images in question, but they are just to images and I can live without them a lot easier than without the last 46 images (the last day).

I guess that I was lucky. There are probably more image media recovery program out there to try, but I’ll save that for next time. If that card had been in a whose way, the disk-fix by windows might have ended in a disaster, with a worse result than if some program (that actaully know and understand the image file format) had tried to rescue my images.

But it would have been even if I had take the words of TransPict at face value and just give up….

(as to why it was only 46 images – this wasn’t a photo vacation, it was family time)

4 thoughts on “Image recovery

  1. lily

    your description is so clearly that I want to have a try.and I do like to recommend one software that you can convert BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, PCX, TGA, TIF, JPEG2000 and Adobe Photoshop PSD to BMP, TIF, TIFF, GIF, JPG,that is,
    AVD Batch Converter,http://www.qweas.com/downlo
    have a good time!

    Reply
  2. Wim Hultink

    Hi TC
    I am the designer of RecoverPlus Pro. Your problem was a hardware problem and that why recovering stalled (as would Windows do reading the card).
    The problem of not being able to display the file is most likely an improper file ending. Since there are no rules for file endings the algoritms are based upon experiences. If you want to cooperate improving RecoverPlus for your kind of .pef files, then please contact me.
    Best Regards, Wim

    Reply

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