Emergency plz help. Card problem

[flair1111]

if anyone could please help. today i had a 6 hour time lapse shoot of a once in lifetime event. involving 100,000 people gathering. i shot it all and had about 1300 pictures. as i was trying to view my pics on my pc they looked fine. but then i tried again and it says that the card must be formated. im loosing my mind now because all that work is going down the drain. plz plz plzzzzzzzz if there is anyone to retrieve the photos plz let me know. would really appreciate it.
hope someone can help
n_laham@hotmail.com is my email
thank you
nadim

 

[Michael Olsen]

Can you view the images when the card is still in the camera?

Do you see any bent pins on any of your connectors?

 

[flair1111]

hey thanx for replying. no sadly i canot view the pics on the pc or my cam. it says i must format. and no there are no bent pins. i dont know what to do.

 

[Michael Olsen]

Afraid that's the limit of my knowledge. I'd give Canon a call.

800-828-4040

I hope it works out for you!

 

[andy mace]

Wow I hope your luck gets better! Have a look at this software. I've used it successfully on a hard drive.

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Google returned this software (which I have no experience with but it looks good):

http://www.card-recovery-software.net/card-recovery.php

Both have demos and it shouldn't hurt to give them a try. Best of luck!!

 

[andy mace]

Also, there is a nice, free, partitioning software CDROM that includes testdisk which can recover lost files. Check it out here:

http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/

There are other boot CDROM's available with testdisk if you want to have a look:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd

 

[Ryan Farnes]

While the pain is fresh and you're still looking for answers, let me open the wound a bit more...

Whenever I've done anything truly irreplaceable, I immediately transfer it to my laptop or external drive so that it is in 2 places. The standard I live by is to create a copy and physically remove it from the original. And then back that up so that when you clear your cards you still have it in 2 separate locations.

I don't know what situation your were previewing them in, but that is when you should have been transferring them. Nonetheless, it sounds like some glitch bit you from behind.

 

[Vince K]

3 things I do with EVERY CF offload....

backup, backup, backup

.....what kind of cards are you using?

 

[NoahK]

Also trying on another computer might help- though it sounds kinda dead.

Noah

 

[Ted Ramasola]

Funny I got a call the other day from a friend, same thing, she plugged her CF into her PC, viewed pics, next thing she coundnt see the files and a sign saying it need s to be formatted.

Is your CF card full to the brim? Hers was. I suspect the PC attempted to write something into the full card thus corrupting it. Try into another PC and see if it wrote a thumbnail file, also a scandisk routine detected lost clusters like "found0000xxx.chk" a telltale sign of corruption.

BTW, her camera was a nikon.

p.s. I think this has something to do with plugging in a CF card to a PC. just cant put a finger on it.

 

[Green Hornet]

Try recovery software (search the net). There should be something to recover the files.