Help With A Corrupt SD Camera Card Please

I have an SD Camera Card which has become corrupted. I use the card in a Canon A570 IS and normally load my pictures onto my Compaq Pentium 4 computer running under Windows XP Pro/SP3.

I have two methods of doing this, either by inserting my card into a reader on my Brother DCP-115C, or by connecting the camera directly to a USB slot using the Canon supplied connector cable.

I have been trying at least 3 'demo' versions of photo rescue programs, notably
- Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery
- SanDisk RescuePro
- Photo Nose.

I have the same problem with each of these programs.

When using the printer card slot the progam 'hangs' before completing its scan, sometimes displaying a 'time out' message. At this point I usually have to reboot as the drive (G:\) no longer responds. It seems to me that there is no way round this as at least one of the above programs claims to handle corrupt disks, and the failure seems to affect the operating of the PC, not just the program I'm running.

When using the direct cable connection to the USB slot, the PC does not seem to recognise it as a 'drive'. Windows Explorer shows the camera by name in the list of items contained under 'My Computer', but there is no drive letter shown. When I click on this item, all I see is a list of photos. It does not show the folder structure on the card at all. I've checked out the Canon Website, and they confirm that Windows XP driver is appropriate, no other driver is available.

Since the camera is not configured as a drive, none of the programs I've tried recognise it.

The last thing I tried is ISORecorderV2RC1 to create a 'hardcopy' (i.e. block for block) of the card on my C:\ drive. This ran for about 3 seconds and produced a file which was less than 1MB and completely unreadable to RescuePro which offers an option to process a 'Image File'.

Has anyone any suggestions?

 

Thanks Plodr. I've managed to find a similar gizmo on UK Amazon. Didn't know such a USB device existed!

If this reader shows the card as a 'Drive' under Windows that'll probably be my best (and last) bet.

Thanks again

 

I don't think a usb dongle like that will make it any better than your card reader on the printer. The card just might be too far gone to be recovered. Try recuva:
http://majorgeeks.com/Recuva_d5514.html

 

Thanks for the warning SmokingGun. I forgot to mention that I have been able to drag all the .JPGs and .AVIs from the camera to a folder on c:\, but a number of them are not recognised by Picture Manager or Media Player (or anything else). So, I am fairly confident that the card is not physically damaged, just mucked up directory entries or address chains.

Anyway, if this final attempt to re-constitute the damaged files fails, then I'll have to give up. At least I have most of my holiday shots.

 

have you tried to check it for errors with windows' error check? (chkdsk)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265/EN-US

 

Yes - I did try chkdsk. It hung too.

At this point I've decided to accept defeat. The gizmo arrived and will be useful as it's very fast compared to the other input devices. However, attempts to retrieve the missing files have failed. The gizmo was recognised as a drive, but again programs failed on trying to read the card, and I had to reboot to get Windows to recognise the drive again (actually, it seemed to be enough to remove and reinsert the gizmo - plug and play I guess) .

I managed to get Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery to create an image of the drive on my c: drive successfully, but recovery from there did not reconstitute the missing images - only the images I had already managed to save.

PS. Thanks for all the responses!