It only takes one damaged CompactFlash card or Microdrive to ruin a shoot or
an entire trip.
Why recover your own images?
While some vendors, like Lexar, offer a service for recovering images from
the cards, this takes several days and a round-trip FedEx bill. If you're
somewhere remote you may not know whether they recovered your images until after
you return.
| The first time this happened to me, I got so frustrated
messing around with Norton & Windows utilities I wound up re-formatting a
card full of Wolf images when camping in Denali. Vowing that I wouldn't
let that happen to me again, I went on a mission to find a repair utility
that would recover the images on my CF cards when I ran into trouble.
After evaluating several packages, I finally found one that worked on
all three damaged or unreadable CF cards I had available to test it with.
It is Disk Commander, from Winternals. It is a really beefy disk repair
utility which can handle much more sophisticated tasks than just
recovering your digital files. You'll be glad to know that since you'll
need to shell out $299 if you want to buy a copy. It's a stiff price tag,
but it's already recovered two cards of images for me while I was
traveling in South Dakota, so I'm very pleased with my investment.
|
A re-sized Nikon D1X JPEG of a Prairie Dog,
recovered by
Disk Commander
|
In the rest of this article I'll take you through step by step how to use
Disk Commander to recover images. First I'll describe the cards and what
happened to them, Two of the cards (Lexar 160MB 10x and Lexar 160MB 8x) had been
filled with images by my D1H so that they didn't show up as drives on the PC or
as usable on the Camera. Formatting would have made these two cards usable
again, but at the cost of losing all the images. The third card (another 160MB
10x) actually had bad sectors. It needs to go back to Lexar in any case, but I
wanted to get the images off it first.
Recovery: Step by Step
| Step 1: Launch Disk Commander Setup and use the Win32
option for launching under Windows |
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| Step 2: Most likely, your film card will not show up
as a drive letter, so you'll need to use Disk Commander's Volume search
capability. |
|
| Step 3: Choose the volume that represents your film
card. Make sure not to select your hard drive or you could cause
yourself real trouble! |
 |
| Step 4: You will almost certainly need to have Disk
Commander scan the disk for lost volumes. That is the most complete way to
find files. |
 |
| Step 5: The scan may take a few minites, but once
you've done it you can always save the results for that card so you don't
need to run it again. |
 |
| Step 6: If you might want to recover files a few at
a time, you can save the volume scanning results for future use. |
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| Step 7: Just in case, it is safest to also back up
the existing partition table. |
 |
| Step 8: This display will vary depending on your
card and your situation. The key is to look for a Lost Volume that might
contain your images. You can try each volume in turn checking all of them
for recoverable images. |
 |
| Step 9: Once you've selected the Volume you want to
restore, you can look for either lost files or even for files you might
have accidentally deleted and want to restore. |
 |
| Step 10: Now you're at the fun part! Disk Commander
displays the folders and files it finds on the card. You can select a
folder to restore, or restore individual files. |
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| Finished!: That's it! You've recovered your images. |
 |
A re-sized Nikon D1H JPEG
of a Rocky Mountain Big-horn Sheep
recovered by
Disk Commander |
You can download and buy Disk Commander in a matter of
minutes (or as long as it takes you to download the nearly 5MB setup file
and receive their license email) from Winternals. Their website is http://www.winternals.com. If you
get a chance let them know that you learned about them from Pro Shooters
LLC. Please let us know your experiences! |
| |
|
--David Cardinal, October 8th, 2001. Photos by David Cardinal
P.S. We've already asked Winternals about providing a less expensive version
for photographers to use with digital film cards and micro-drives. So far they
aren't interested, but we'll keep trying to find a less expensive alternative!