GH2 GH2 locked up mid-shoot. Card unreadible. Please help me not panic ....

GrahamH

GrahamH

Well-known member
Shooting for several hours on a 16MB SD card today that I've used repeatedly with no problems. A couple of hours in I get a warning along the lines of "Card is not sufficiently fast to support the video stream" ... something like that anyway.

And .. the camera froze. The recording light stayed on, regardless of whether the camera power switch was on or off, and all controls became unresponsive. Waited a few minutes, no change, so pulled the battery, put in a new card, and carried on without further problems.

My BIG problem now is that I get a "card needs to be formatted" error when I try to read that card on my laptop. So I guess I've screwed my file allocation table or whatever it is SD cards have. Yikes!

So - two questions. 1) Have others had this happen?

And 2) any recommendations for suitable disk recovery software???? I sure hope so ...

Thanks in advance - feel a bit sick to my stomach presently :(
 
Thanks for the reply - I should have said I'm on a PC so would be more comfortable with Windows software, all else equal.I was shooting 720p60 to a Transend 16mb card on the 'no adverse effects' patch - 32mb data rate I think I recall. Have done this for the past 6 months with no previous problems whatsoever ...
 
Had a very similar problem with a 7D a few years ago. I tried everything possible, but was not able to save the files.... wish you luck....
 
Recuva just reports "No boot sector found"Oy vey. Any other PC suggestions? - it will obviously require something low-level at this point. Sigh ...
 
This happened to me once before. I was able to recover the files since the camera was able to see the files but the pc could not. Used a USB connector between the pc and the camera with the card in the camera... Al
 
I don't have the time to look for it now but either you can search or somebody else will remember. Panasonic has a utility that helps retrieve corrupted files - it does not say for AVCHD but rather Intra but the person who used it was working with a GH camera. It's on this site somewhere and on Panasonic's site also and the OP had some success with it.

Wish I could be more precise, but perhaps there is hope. Best of luck.
 
Good suggestion @aljudy ... Unfortunately the camera can't see anything on the card either (and helpfully offers to reformat it for me).

Turns out the 16GB Transend SD has a recall on some batches presently ..... "for a problem evident above 4GB". Wonderful.

I'll investigate the Panasonic ap, but I suspect it won't be able to see the files either.
 
GrahamH can you describe exactly what you were shooting? I would like to hear about any errors with those settings. I tried to make it fail with my barely class 6 EYE-Fi and it has never failed. Are you using the latest "No adverse Affects"(The one on the far right).?

It is possible that the hack wasn't stable for your particular scenario. However, it is also possible that the card got a bad sector and just simply failed.
 
Mpgxsvcd - I am confident your patch is in no way responsible - it was a low-detail scene with a non-Lumix lens that's somewhat soft. Transend have issue a recall on that batch of 16gb cards, so I'm sure that's where the fault lies ... I've used your patch for months in much more challenging situations, and will continue doing so. (Thanks for it, by the way!)
 
recover my photos works best for me - you can select different types of video footage and it works very well
 
I wanted to let folk know the eventual resolution of my problem with the 16GB SD card that failed several hours into a GH2 shoot shortly before Xmas, preventing me from accessing the 100+ .mts files already recorded on the card. Aaaargghh!

I tried quite a wide range of high- and low-level software fixes suggested here and on various other forums, none of which had any success because I couldn't access the card at all, either via the camera itself or the computer. The computer wrongly reported the card's size as only 1GB, which led me to suspect that the card controller had failed so that software fixes weren't going to be of any help.

I then investigated about 10 commercial recovery companies that offer to bypass the card's controller to physically recover the files. The problem of course was that none of these were cheap (I got quotes ranging as high as $2000 - eek!). The option I eventually went with was Recoverfab http://recoverfab.com/ in Germany; they quote a fixed rate per size of card they are recovering, and that rate was less than half the quotes I had been getting from the other companies I contacted.

Very straightforward process - I filled out RecoverFab's online form, and got back mailing instructions for the card immediately. I didn't select any rush option, but within a week I had confirmation of card receipt and then a couple of days later an email with the results of their recovery (all files successfully retrieved - hooray!!!) plus a Paypal link to pay. (If recovery had been unsuccessful there would have been no charge). I selected to immediately download the files from their server, but they will also mail them back on DVDs if you wish.

Obviously a card hardware failure is something I would not wish on any of you, but if it does happen it's reassuring to know that there is a good probability of recovering the files provided you have the budget to do so!
 
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