PhotoRescue to the... well... Rescue!
August 8th, 2007 | 0 comments
I've never been more happy to plunk down my credit card number before.
I went camping last weekend, we hiked up a mountain in Strathcona Park - about 5 hours hike in and then back again - Of course I had to lug my camera and tripod along. Imagine my distress when I learned the hard way why seasoned dSLR owners recommend taking multiple memory cards. Being new to the whole digital-thing I had yet to experience card-failure, and of course my first experience would be after shooting off some 150~ photos on a beautiful hike into the middle of nowhere.
It started with "WRITE ERROR", but after trying unsuccessfully (and a little naively) to delete the last few photos in desperate attempt to somehow get the card working again, it full out failed - wouldn't read, either. Fortunately Kim had her film camera and we had a handful or rolls of film, so I was able to borrow it to take some pictures of the top.
A bigger issue was all my missing photos. Gone. After returning I threw the card in my card reader, and nothing - windows wouldn't recognize it. I tried several "card recovery programs" which all cheerfully informed me that every single sector on the Compact Flash card was bad. Since most claimed the could recover from a formatted card, I tried a last ditch attempt to at least make it readable by reformatting - no dice. Windows won't even format it. It's toast.
Right before giving up I stumbled across PhotoRescue. They claimed to be able to recover from corrupted cards (as did most other software I tried, but they all lied!) - so I gave it a shot. It took over 48 hours (and during the whole time spit out an "read error" for what looked like every single sector on the card), but it worked. Every single photograph recovered. It ran and recovered the pictures with the free trial, but asked for a serial number to be able to save them. Fair enough! $29? A bargain! Cheaper than it would have been to develop it all, if it were film!
The card is still completely fried, I can't reformat it, and I think if I could I wouldn't trust it anymore anyway. Now I know - always pack multiple cards, and never buy a SanDisk card again.
So, Thank you DataRescue for your excellent software!