Precious memories, unreliable media

My friend Jennifer just got back from her trip to Africa, Amsterdam and Paris. Upon arrival back in the US she discovered that her pictures on her camera were not accessible. Knowing how important the photographs from a once in a lifetime trip can be, I offered my assistance.

I asked her to bring the camera to the Continental Club last night so I could work my magic. Initially she thought it might just be the camera that was the problem. By this time it would not even turn on. I figured I could put the memory card in my computer and perhaps see the files and be able to pull them down to my computer.

No joy. When I plugged the card into my camera the indicator flashed that the memory was completely full but when I  tried to view the contents the camera reported that there were no files. Yuk!

I gave Jennifer her camera and took the disk home. When I connected the camera to my laptop and attempted to view the contents of the card what I saw was none too encouraging…

 

Nothing but gibberish. The good news was that my computer could see the data, the bad news was that it looked fairly corrupted.

I have worked on regular hard drives and on floppy disks to recover data, but never on a flash memory card. I wasn’t 100% sure if I could do it on my own but I decided to give it a try.

I had recently been given a copy of Data Recovery Wizard Pro 2.0 to review and have not had the opportunity to play with it. This would be my test subject.

I installed the software and went through the steps and what do you know? I was able to recover about 95-98% of the images from the disk!

Ah, the satisfaction of overcoming adversity! I look forward to giving Jennifer the CD with the recovered files on it.