[UnknownVT]

I have never heard of Centron before. I have learned to stay away from cheap cards and only buy reputable brands (Sandisk has never failed me) from reputable dealers (not on the street). A friend of mine has just returned from Hong-Kong where he bought a fake Sandisk card. He lost all his photos. I also prefer 4x2Go cards than an 8Go one, to minimize the risks in case of a failure.

Centron is actually a well known memory maker for PCs -
I don't get out much either......

Of course it's a safe bet just to buy SanDisk or Lexar
(just like it was at one time to buy IBM) -
but they have had their share of failures too - nothing is infallible -
add to that because these brands are well known and oft recommended
there are plenty of fakes out there and not all easily recognizable either.

Most SDHC cards from reasonably well known manufacturers are actually pretty reliable -
of course there are horror stories -
but these are few and far between
otherwise we'd all know which are the bad ones
and avoid them like a plague -
and guess what? if people really did that, would that product still be sold?

I like and have used MjM's Photo Recovery but it is PC/Windows.....

[brettb]

@sterretje thanks for the info. I already know deep in my soul that:

1) I'll never reproduce the problem
2) The "bad" card will continue to work for years in my netbook.
3) The camera will work fine forever.

This is why I believe their is a God and he hates me. (or has a sense of humor that no one else gets but him)

But on the plus side, I learned more about SD cards.

[CWyatt]

Cheap SD cards are evil.

[Christopher M.W.T]

As part of my image recovery system in case of loss I use.

Easeus Data Recovery &

TestsDisk (freeware)

both are excellent although not foolproof.

[Rico]

Prosoft's Data Rescue 3 supports PEF files. I actually sent them like 10 PEF files to use to add to the file formats that Data Rescue will recover. It works. When they finished working on adding PEF support which took only several days I was able to recover images I deleted from an SD card.

[UnknownVT]

Piriform's Recuva
and
PhotoRec

have had good recommendations here.

Recuva (Wikipedia link) is by Piriform who also produce cCleaner - one of the very top Freeware that I use on a more than daily basis on my PC.

PhotoRec (Wikipedia link) I was very impressed with the Wiki- type layout of their site and the way it's documented.
PhotoRec seems to bundled with TestDisk - which also seems to be a very useful tool - note: according to the Softpedia review TestDisk may be hard to use - but PhotoRec is supposed to be very easy....

[jogiba]

Can someone explain to me why a person would spend $1,000 for a DSLR then buy a cheap POS memory card to put all of their photos on.

[Photo1960]

I had a similar problem when my K10D clicked over from 9999 to 0001 in the middle of a wedding I was shooting. I was unaware of a problem at the time, but reviewing the shoot on my computer, I realized the entire processional was missing plus a few shots of the exchange of vows.

As the blood drained from my face, I started looking frantically for the recovery software that had come with my Lexar SD card. Panic is a powerful if not dependably rational motivator. As it turned out, all of the missing 28 photos were on the card, but the K10D simply hadn't included their file names in the file table. I had not formatted the card after the shoot and the files were successfully recovered.

The next time the K10D clicked over to 0001, it was also during a wedding. I followed the file numbering and reviewed the shots on the display. Everything went OK this time.

[InStitches49]

Same thing happened to my son and his bride after their honeymoon last June...I saw the photos on their camera and then when she went to print them out (took out the SD card), there was nothing. She took the card and camera to a local store (Wolf Camera) where they tried and tried but never could get all those photos back. She was so upset, bless her heart, because it was their honeymoon. I had wanted to download their photos straight from the camera the day they came over to show me, but didn't want to be a bossy new mother-in-law. Wished afterwards I had just gone ahead and done that! Sad way to learn a lesson for sure.

[rowergirl369]

Folks, I've had the same issue and initially attributed it to a crappy card, but then purchased a more expensive one and the same has happened... randomly it tells me it can't read the image when the photo was just taken. And, then when I put it in the computer, there are a few others it tells me have no data. I've not tried to recover them yet, but am not convinced it's the card as it has now happened with three different cards. Very frustrating, I'm a long time Pentax user, but have never had this issue prior to the K-7. Any thoughts?

[UnknownVT]

Folks, I've had the same issue and initially attributed it to a crappy card, but then purchased a more expensive one and the same has happened... randomly it tells me it can't read the image when the photo was just taken. And, then when I put it in the computer, there are a few others it tells me have no data. I've not tried to recover them yet, but am not convinced it's the card as it has now happened with three different cards. Very frustrating, I'm a long time Pentax user, but have never had this issue prior to the K-7. Any thoughts?

Often it is the card -
but it sounds like in your case it may be the camera.

I know it sounds off-topic - but I had a Canon PowerShot A1200 p&s compact that occasionally would lose pictures.

Everything would look fine and I can see pictures as I take them, and even review them -
then all of a sudden the images get corrupted and I can lose previously reviewed images.

This happened 4 times on different cards of different makes,
including one that had seen service for over 4 years in two other Canon compacts without any problems.

Fortunately for me I was able to recover most of my images using mainly MjM Photo Recovery
(disappointingly Recuva didn't even see any images to recover)
and I did have to resort to PhotoRec to recover a single image.

In the end Canon replaced the camera mid-March/2012,
and since then and over 3,100 pictures later there has not been a single problem of losing images.

I'm afraid the only way to determine whether it is the card or camera
is to change cards - different make/capacity -
and see if the problem occurs again -
in your case you've done just that
and it seems pretty unlikely that you would have two bad cards -
to be absolutely sure you could always try a third different card.....

[pento57mm]

Try the Seagate file recovery software demo. https://services.seagate.com/diysoftware.aspx This has saved several corrupted SD cards on our end. We initially bought the software for a failed hard-drive a while back and it worked wonders on that.
When one of my SD cards failed I thought what the heck. Might as well give the Seagate a go and it recovered every thing, even partial images on one card that had a DOD ( Department of Defense ) 35 pass overwrite. It cost's $99.00 but worth every penny. I can't remember what the demo features are but I am sure it will give you some idea of whats recoverable on your SD card.

Hope this helps

[siu]

In your case, I guess your SD card was corrutpted caused by partition error. Maybe you can reuse the SD card after formatting, but I think you do not want to lose the data, right? so, you can fix the SD card first.
1, you can use the "CHKDSK" tools in Windows to scan the error of SD card.
2.Go to the "my conputer", and Right-cilck thedrive represent your SD card,then click "properties" , you can see the "tool" and click "check" maybe windows can fix your card.
3.fix tool, you also can search some fix tool on the Internret to fix SD card.