Epic H4n Zoom audio faliure

D

draven4

Well-known member
Uh... I just got back from shooting an interview (1 interview) I had a 16 gb card in my zoom H4n and suddenly near the end of shooting I got a "write error" in the middle of a take and audio stopped. I tried again and it recorded then a few minutes later same thing. Then it read "card full". That is not possible because it was a 16 gig card and I had just formatted it before the shoot. I had only ran takes no longer than 12 mins at a time. The zoom was plugged in so I wasn't using battery power.

When I got home I plugged the USB cable into the mac and it asked to initialize the disk as if nothing was on it. I hit eject. Then checked it on my zoom and it too said "format card".


Any thoughts? Has this happened to anyone? I am thinking the card got corrupt. I bought the SD card at Fry's about 6 months ago. I had this "write error" one time but it never came back until today. Never got the error with the 1gig card it came with so I am thinking it's the stupid card. I'm just scared now to use this on another shoot even if it I use it with the factory card.

As of now looks like ALL my audio is gone!! :furious3:
 
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Oh forgot to add, when I meant happened before what I meant was after the first time it gave the error I took the card out of the H4N and put it back in then all was well. Not the case this time. It is not seeing any files.

Not going to be fun explaining this to my client after I sold him on the idea of using a 7d for the shoot and not an HD video camera.
 
What SD brand card?

I guess the next step would be to get software to restore any data on the card. Data Rescue 3 or similar apps.

Sorry to hear that happen.
 
Yes, you need software to restore all data.

Plus never ever try to wrote to SD if you get error message.
Have other card with you.

Plus use only best freshly formatted SD cards during actual takes.
 
I haven't had personal experience with this, but I have heard that:

a) the Zoom recorders have trouble with cards over 8 gb

b) they have trouble with "cheap" cards.
 
Yeah the brand name is not a big one. Cheap. That's what I get. I bought it at Fry's Electronics. The brand is LX Series Patriot 16 GB Class 10 SDHC Flash Memory Card.

Wow I just looked up a review on Amazon for this card and someone talks about it being the worst card. They got errors too. Also someone else said their card got corrupted and they lost all their vacation pictures. Wow!

Thanks for all the replies from everyone. I will try data recovery.
 
Also, try putting it in a card reader and not trying to read the card off the zoom. I had something similar happen to my HD-P2, and the card read fine in the card reader.
 
For what it's worth, I only buy Sandisk CF and SD cards, have done so for 6-7 years. Only a single CF card had to be replaced (no data lost) out of about a dozen I have from 2GB - 32GB.

Never go by price when it comes to solid state memory and hard drives. Find a reliable brand and stay with it.
 
Makes the case for why it's worthwhile to use a decent quality external microphone on the camera, even when you're recording double system with an external recorder. While the audio that the external camera mic picks up likely isn't optimal, it will at least be better than the on-board mic. In the event of equipment failure, your back-up audio may turn out to be usable.
 
As noted, perhaps a 'data recovery' program could detect the existence of the WAV file, and recover as much as was written to the file until the failure, or less however much is buffered in the Zoom before the write.

By placing the failed card back into the Zoom, the 'automatic' response of the zoom may have been to rewrite the file system structure, (usually leaving the data untouched), and so, now it truly does not have
accessible files by 'normal' means.

Future admonishment... carry spares always. Don't put a 'failed' device back into the recording device. Get a 'file recovery' program and run that before plugging the memory card into the reaqder. (or whatever the instructions are for the file recovery program.)

Because I use a Mac, and spend most of my 'day job' at a command line interface, I ususally run a program called 'dd' to copy the data, in a 'raw' data mode, off of a 'damaaged' disk or memory device, to archive an image
of the data on the device before doing anything else. Then I run the 'recovery' program. Don't know if the various programs have such a 'image save' mode...
 
J2clark,

I too am on a mac. I am on a quad G5. Any suggestions on which data recovery to use.
As of now every system I have tried to have the card read the operating system immediately asks to "format card". Of course I hit ignore. I also tried making a disk image of the card, as the mac saw the card in Disk Utility. So I have some kind of back up. As of now when I try to open the card image it says it cannot do it because it does not have a file structure or something along the lines of that.

Can I run data recovery from the command line? If you wouldn't mind sharing what are the commands to copy the raw files and data recover from the terminal.

Also just so you know the mac will immediately try to format the card every time it is read so is it even possible to copy the files of the card when it can't even read a file structure in the first place.

As for the comments above about having a secondary backup I think that is a huge lesson learned! I guess I placed too much trust in the Zoom H4n.

On a side note from that I wish Canon would just disable the damn auto gain on the camera and give us control. That would have solved many problems. I would have just recorded straight to the camera if I could but because of this it is not an option because of the auto gain. It is an option though for a backup.
 
I also have access to a linux computer so if anyone is nerdy enough to know how to data recover on a linux that can be of help too. Unfortunately even linux which usually will recognize any drive I put in did not even see this card either, which leads me to believe major damage was done.
 
Googled how to do DD data recover. It is in process now. I will post results and how to do it if successful.
 
Was able to copy with the terminal using DD data copy to copy the entire SD card drive off. After I downloaded and ran Stellar Phoenix data recovery for mac and it failed. I'm now giving up.

Lesson learned - don't buy storage cards!
 
What brand of card? Not to denigrate a brand from just this situation.

I only buy Sandisk CF and SD cards for 6-7 years now. Have maybe 12-15 total that I use for photography, video and audio. Only one card ever required replacement, had been used with a Leaf digital back, no data loss. Never had a single corrupt file out of hundreds of thousands of image files, along with the added video and audio over the last 2 years. They cost more but for me the reliability is worth it.
 
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