From Post
#6 of
Photo Recovery
Here's the description that gave me the hint to use Quick Format on my SD card -
source:
Recuva on formatted disks Quote: Recovery from damaged or formatted disks
The dreaded hard drive crash. The file you forgot to backup before you reformatted a drive. The camera memory card with your holiday snaps that no longer works. Recuva can handle them too.
Windows (and other operating systems) uses a hidden index on hard drives, USB drives, and memory cards. Instead of having to search through the entire drive for a file you request, all it has to do is look it up in the index -- a much faster process.
Unfortunately, if the index is damaged, Windows can no longer find your files, even if the files themselves haven't been corrupted. That's where Recuva comes in.
Unlike Windows, Recuva scans all parts of a drive, looking for the bits that make up your files. If a drive's index has been damaged, chances are other parts of the drive may have been damaged too. Recuva will show you a list of files it has found on the drive, and give you an estimate of the likelihood of success of recovering them.
Similarly, when you format a drive (especially if you use the Quick Format option), Windows erases the hidden index but does not overwrite the existing files until you start saving new data to it. Recuva can still scan the drive's contents to find your files.
This is what I believe happened to my SD card - the "hidden index" probably got corrupted - so that my camera gave memory error and could not use it - and my PC would not even recognize the SD card -
so I was "forced" to format the SD card so that my PC could "see" the card.
Obviously once I had read the above - I knew to use only the "Quick Format" -
and was successful in recovering my photos.
Originally posted by catastrophe Well, the problem is that the computer says the card is not formatted and therefore can't access the card. Even though Icare recovery which is the only program that can retrieve the files, all DNG files and blank white once imported, while PEF have the pink lines all over it, although they appear normal before the import.
BUT the question that needs to be asked - how was LR3 even able to display those thumbnails in its library/gallery as shown in your opening post - IF the card isn't even recognized by your PC?
Just to be clear you are talking about the original card that was used in your camera to take those photos
- or are you talking about some separate backup/copy?
EDIT to ADD -
don't know if this might help
(have used this - but not on memory cards) -
ISObuster
claims to be able to recover files -
Quote: All
device access, media access, data gathering and interpretation is done exclusively by the software. It does not rely on Windows to provide or interpret the data and so can work completely independent from Windows' limitations.
so might not require any formatting for recovery?