Olympus ate my files

[ethan cooper]

recorded some audio yesterday with my trusty old Olympus LS-10 but at the end of the day I was attempting to play back the files using the recorder and it suddenly restarted and the files went missing. I was able to recover one using photorec but the second file isn't being so nice.

photorec did recover a 375MB .hdf file and I'm wondering if this is from the LS-10. Anyone know how the heck I can try converting the .hdf file to something else?

 

[Rick R]

Did the recorder in question lose power (dead battery) prior to the file being saved. Many times these 'files' can have cryptic file names and unusual extensions. Never encountered a .hdf (Hierarchical Data Format) file though.
FWIW, I have recovered unsaved audio using Piriform's Recuva. The don't usually have a familiar extensions because the TOC/ metadata ID chunks were not written. After re-saving the files to another drive, I change or add the extension <.raw> and attempt to open it in Sound Forge Pro. AFAIK, Sound Forge Audio Studio will not open a *.raw file, neither will Vegas Pro or Acid. Reaper might possibility. I don't know about Audacity.

 

[ethan cooper]

I tried Recuva but never could find the files, for whatever reason Photorec found something Recuva couldn't.

The recorder didn't lose power, I had it loaded with Energizer lithiums which power it for something like 27 years so that wasn't an issue. I think the card (or data on the card) corrupted. Right before it messed up on me I had turned it on and it took about 3x as long to start up as normal, I'm guessing this had something to do with having trouble reading the card. I went to play a file and it simple restarted, I've never seen that happen before.

Here's another riddle:
while using Photorec to scan the card & grab files, a .wav file (the missing file) will be put in the recovery folder, the file gets larger as it's copied over to the folder but once it's fully copied it disappears. I can duplicate the file as it's being copied and the duplicates remain but I can never get the entire file since duplication messes up once the file does it's disappearing act.

Anyone care to take a stab at that one?