Cruise Pictures..."Unknown File Format"?? Uh oh!

I just got home from a week long cruise and 3 128mb smart media cards full
of lifetime memories. One of the cards was full of "unknown file format"
error messages. All the pictures but one were corrupt. I used PC Inspector
Smart Recovery program to successfully recover 95% of them but a few were
just partially recovered. Elements can't open it because of "unknown or
invalid jpeg marker type is found". Irfanview says "unknown file format"
and PSP 9 says it's not identified as a supported type. Is there any
recovery program that might be able to load ALL of those few that just
partially loaded? Before leaving for our cruise, I formatted all the cards
in the camera. This particular card had an .avi movie on it that doesn't
appear on the card now. I reviewed it on the camera earlier this week but
it doesn't show up in the DCIM folder.
Thanks,
Monica

 

Forgot to mention that once I recovered the photos, the partial photos show
complete in thumbnail size....enlarge it and it's part picture and part
gray.

 

PhotoRescue is proably a better recovery program, but where you recovered
such a high percentage of what was on the card I doubt if it would do any
better in this case. I agree with Ron below, be very careful no writing is
taking place when you remove the card.
Dave Cohen

 

Thanks guys. I was fairly certain I'd gotten all I was going to get.
Thought just I'd ask to make sure. After emailing, I noticed the file size
on those that didn't completely turn out. They're small (<200kb) so there's
nothing there to "recover". I have (2 actually) Oly 2100UZs (UZi). I try
to be very aware of turning the camera off after all writing is stopped. I
have a digipack power supply instead of batteries....oh, you know what!
Come to think of it, on this last card there was 3 or 4 times that the
camera indicated the card door was open It didn't appear to be but maybe
it was just enough to cause the error message. Hummmm, I'll have to watch
that. Thanks again for your replies.
Monica

 

If they were about the right size then it may be possible to recover
them provided that most of the data is intact. Obviously if they are too
small then the rest has been lost for all eternity. But worth trying on
the original media with PhotoRescue just in case their heuristics find a
few files that another package has missed. Each one has its strengths.

It only takes a few bytes of unlucky damage to a JPEG stream to render
it totally undecodable (that is a price you pay for efficient
compression). Some can be repaired but unfortunately the JPEG repair
process is not cost effective for holiday snaps.

One thing that can trash a memory card is when their is an intermittent
or dirty electrical contact on it. But by far the most common causes are:

1. Ejecting the card from a socket whilst a write is still in progress.

2. Inserting it into a card reader after physically ejecting another
card but without explicitly demounting the volume (for some strange
reason Windows does not always honour the media changed flag). If this
happens you get the old directory info smashed down on top of the new
card - not good.

You should try to figure out what caused the failure to prevent it
happening again. If you only lost 5% you were quite lucky this time.

Regards,
Martin Brown