Unreadable SD card

[pjw77]

I have a 2GB SD card that seems to have stopped working. My camera won't read it at all. I have tried to read it using a USB card reader, also taken it to several phtographic shops to use their equipment all to no avail.:mad: I don't want to lose my photos and films already on there. Does anyone know of anyway I can retrieve them? Or anything I can do?
Thanks

[David Metsky]

Try some of the products mentioned in this thread (http://www.dcresource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30651). Good luck.

[r_davey]

I have the same card and I've had problems with it twice now. Both poblems occurred when it got to be very close to 50% full.

The first time I had a problem Windows Explorer could open the drive and see two empty directories although properties indicated it had 50% used space and had 936,nnn,nnn bytes free out of 1,8nn,nnn,nnn bytes total space. I searched high and low at the time and tried several different utilities. None of them found everything that I knew was on the card. The one that found the most and everything the others found turned out to be a freeware utility called PC Inspector File Recovery V4.0 availabe at: http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm. It wasn't very easy to use but I managed to get most of my lost photos off.

I've just returned from another expensive vacation with lost photos again. The symptoms were somewhat different this time. When I looked at the card with Windows Explorer it indicated I had 0 bytes free of 0 bytes total space. PC Inspector found nothing. Thinking all might be lost I started searching the web again and found a reference to the cards manufacturer ValGear and a one page website at http://www.valgear.com/ . The support number is either incorrect or out of service but there is a link to a tool called Digital Image Recovery that was very easy to use. It found to the best of my knowlege all the new photos I had taken. It did not find the one video I had taken, but then it was junk anyway.

Now for the good news. After rmy first problem the camera's manufacturer HP recommended I format the card before using it again and I did that. But after this second hiccup when I ran the ValGear utility it not only found the new images but most of the images(or parts of them) from the first problem and most notably the two very important images I knew were on the card that PC Inspector had not found.

I hope this helps someone else who comes across this post!


Robin