The trashed flash card
I've had a bit of a disaster with my Transcend 4GB SDHC flash card. I shot a bunch of video and stills when I was away on holidays recently. When I got back I used my SDHC compatible USB card reader to try and download the files. Unfortunately, something went awry and the card got corrupted. I lost everything on there. Luckily I had previously backed some of it up.
That's painful enough, but now the card seems to be totalled. I can't reformat it in the camera, via my Mac or even on a PC. I've tried half a dozen different ways to try and reformat it with no success at all. The camera chokes on it, the Mac won't even mount it, and the PC gets most the way through a format and comes up with an error saying it can't complete the format. Strangely enough, both the camera and the PC report that the card is 24GB in capacity which is clearly wrong.
I've never had a flash card crap out on me like this before. Do you think it is beyond salvage or can you suggest ways I might be able to revive it?
6 comments:
Sandisk includes a flash card recovery program in some of their packages. Not sure how helpful it would be in your case.
http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Catalog(1186)-RescuePro.aspx
I purchased one of these exact cards when I bought my TX1 and it died in a very similar fashion. According to the online retailer where I purchased and subsequently returned it, there have been a few "bad batches" of these cards. I decided to replace it with a Kingston and haven't had any additional issues.
You said you returned it - did they offer to replace it or substitute it then?
They offer a refund or exchange - I opted for the refund.
Interestingly, DigitalRev have declined to give me either a refund or exchange because it was longer than a week after purchase.
I have a TX1 and an 8GB Class 2 SDHC card. It has gotten corrupted for the third time now! I am quite unhappy. I don't know if it's the card, card reader, or camera's fault. Each time it happened after I wrote a non-camera file to the card. I am wondering if that is the cause--even though it shouldn't be. I am a bit suspicious it is one of two things: 1. The card-reader (SanDisk Micromate) doesn't handle writing properly. 2. The TX1 can't handle other files and corrupts the filesystem on the card when it tries to handle those files.
In any case, I have had wonderful success with a piece of software called Card Recovery. http://www.cardrecovery.com/ It has recovered 98% of my lost pictures (in once case nearly 5 GB! an entire two week trip to Karen villages in Thailand!). It doesn't properly retrieve my videos, unfortunately, even though it theoretically can. It retrieves just bits and pieces of it (and that's only after I run it through the excellent software made by Rising Research, Digital Video Repair--Freeware http://www.risingresearch.com/en/dvr/).
Card Recovery's free demo will scan your card, tell you what it can recover, provide a thumbnail of what it can recover, but you must buy the paid version to actually recover it. I did so and it's been WELL, WELL worth it! I spent hours and hours and tried a multitude of other flash memory and undelete recovery tools and found Card Recovery to be far superior to any of them.
(btw, my blog (http://hansmast.com) has lots of pictures taken with my TX1. I am living in Asia as a student and am traveling all over--I've been to Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and am shortly heading to India, Laos, and Cambodia. The recent Hong Kong post, however, I shot with my sister's DSLR Canon Rebel XTi.)
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