Compact flash disaster! Haven't seen this before

S

sram

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 30, 2007
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My friend brought me his media card reader with a CF block attached to it to make me get the so many pictures he has in there out of it. He said he can't read them anymore. When asking him what happened, he said that he took the block out of his camera, put it in the media card reader and inserted it to an USB 3.0 port in his laptop. It worked for few moments and suddenly all pictures disappeared !!! All that can be seen in the CF drive in windows is the two folders that his Sony/canon camera creates and in one of them there is one huge file of 3.5 GB size. When he puts it in the camera, pictures won't show as well of course. The killer is that the used space in the drive is exactly like before !!! Everything is in one stupid large file with no known file type!!!

What happened? The file name is USBئ or something like that! USB followed by some stupid weird characters.

I tried recovery programs to no avail. Any thing to do before I give up and say sorry to him?

I think the CF block is still usable. But how did all pictures got into one huge file?

Thanks.
 
Does he have some kind of software on his pc that might try to do something with pictures on a card once it's inserted? Like sync the files to a certain folder or what not?
 
First, DO NOT WRITE TO THE COMPACT FLASH AT ALL!!! In fact, avoid using it until you are ready to recover files. This is the first rule in data recovery.

Second, download GetDataBack. If the CF is still readable by the computer, GetDataBack will read the whole drive and rebuild the file table, recovering what files it can.

This software has saved me when a similar scinario happened with my SD card. I was taking pictures of a wedding when my camera decided to "forget" all of my pictures. Out of 120 pictures, it left 5 files on the card, all of them unreadable. I immediately took the SD out and did not use it until I could get home and run GDB on it. I was able to recover all of my pictures.

Hope this helps.

-Cool-
 
Your friend is leaving something out. It 'worked for few moments' doing what? Did he actually see the pictures 'suddenly disappear'? If so, he must have been doing something which caused the CF to 'work for a few moments'.

Have you tested the 3.5GB file to make sure it's not an archive? Try opening it with 7zip and WinRAR.

Did he do something stupid like merging all of the images into one giant file using the copy command? Open the file in an ASCII text editor (which supports large files) and look for words like EXIF, JFIF, Sony, Canon, 2010, 2011. If you see multiple instances, then this is likely what happened.

Was any backup software running on the Laptop set to automatically back-up to an external drive? Along the lines of what munkle said.

Does he use any special file copying software like Robocopy, Richcopy, Fastcopy, Teracopy, etc?
 
Data recovery for flash media is cheap - $50~$150. Just send it to a data recovery company; they will read the flash chip directly and get everything back. Or, if you feel like it, you could always buy a nand reader yourself and do the same thing.
 
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