SD card problem

[freddiestarfish]

Right, I've been away for the weekend and taken some photos (not very good ones, but still...).
Half way through, when I turned the camera on it told me that the card (sd) was not formatted, so would not take pics or show me what was on the card.
"This is rather odd" I thought, but thought I could get the pics off as my laptop has one of those built in Sd/mmc etc card readers.

I put it in, and nothing seems to happen, I click on the F: drive where it should be, and it tells me to "please insert a disc".

So, I put the card into the camera and plug that in via USB.
The little safely remove hardware thing comes up in the taskbar, and G: in my computer also appears. But the "what do you want to do?" box doesn't come up, and if I try to view the stuff on the camera it again tells me to "insert a disc into G: drive".

Is there anything I can do that doesn't involve formatting the card so that I can get the pics?

[Dude]

Unfortunatly no, there isn't. This happened to me too, I lost an hour of skate footage. When you need to reformat it, it basically means that the SD card has fucked up somewhere. I don't think they have any error correction built into them, so when they do mess up there's nothing you can do.

[freddiestarfish]

Well shit.

[Minted]

If you try a quick format it shouldn't erase the data area. The try this app:

http://aumha.org/downloads/restoration.exe

and see if you can recover any of the files. Thats about the best you can hope for i'm afraid.

[Dude]

Quick format DOES erase the data. Um, yeah, because i tried it before.

[Minted]

A quick format will make the disk show as blank yes. It'll rewrite the disk index to show the data area as blank, but that app I linked to can find files that aren't listed in the index. That's how deleted files are recovered, they are never actually removed - the index entry for them is simply removed.

A full format on the other hand not only clears the index but writes over the data areas to ensure they are blank.

Not guaranteeing it'll work, but it's worth a shot.

[Tiggs]

As long as you don't do anyhting to the card other than format it the data should stay intact. Even just sticking in the camera will cause some data to be written to the card and so some data may be lost.

Format it in your computer and then run minted's program. My brother has recovered some very important corusework form a corrupted hard drive that way before.

[freddiestarfish]

Well that's odd, it restored loads of different photos I took ages ago, but not the ones I took this weekend.

Not too sure what to do now...

[Minted]

That sucks man, it looks like the ones taken this weekend were totally corrupted if that little app can't see them. I don't think theres much else you can do, except maybe hold a little service to commemorate their passing. As a person who recently reformatted a hard drive and forgot to back up properly (4 gigs of images gone :() I feel your pain.

Your best bet now is to format the card fully to ensure theres no bad areas on it and start afresh.