Corrupt Memory Card - Camera

[garethEds]

Hi Guys,

 

On Monday whilst visiting Folly Farm in Pembrokeshire we took some photos of my son with Fireman Sam only to get them home and discover the camera card has become corrupt.

 

I'm currently running it through a file recovery application (Recuva) to see if anything his salvagable. What I have discvered is that 4 pictures have written themselves over and over again (see screenshot). Does anyone have any advice on any solution I can try? The software has found old photos before the corruption but the latest ones from Monday are not there.

 

Each repeated picture has a new filename.

 

Anyone?

 

Cheers

 

Gareth

[FN-GM]

Are you sure its not a dodgy thumbs.db file? What happens if you open one in say paint rather than viewing it a thumbnail?

 

Thanks

[tom_newton]

Have you tried photorec? Though I am sure it will give similar results to recuva.

[Geoff]

+1 for photorec, this is exactly what it's designed for.

[MatthewL]

Photorec saved my life when this happened to me. I know regurarly format my memory card to save errors like this.

[garethEds]

I'm not sure what has happened. The same 4 pictures have written themselves over and over again to the camera card. 6000 copies of them.

 

No software seems to be helping. Never mind.

 

Gareth

[Geoff]

Might be an issue with the camera perhaps? Or simply the filesystem got corrupted in a specific odd way.

[SYNACK]

What filesystem is it, FAT32, EXFAT or NTFS. They are structured differently and there could be either corruption to the FAT table or recursive links in the MFT.

 

There was an app somewhere on here that created a RAW image of a memory card so that you could try various stuff without further killing the data. I'd suggest using this then running the recovery tools over the image. Stuff like testdisk and even (on the image) chkdsk to prune any recursive links. Other than that a low level sector by sector scan that looked for patterns of files might be the best be (not sure if these exist outside data recovery places).

 

I doubt that the files are all identical but possibly the pointers have been messed with linking all the files to the same place. The raw data may still be there in the card.

[Geoff]

If there was anything recoverable photorec would of found it. It ignores the filesystem to an extent.

[rich_tech]

I looked at the card with Gareth yesterday, it is a very strange thing that's happened, it appears to me that the camera has somehow written the same 4 images onto the card, over and over again, running active file recovery and recuva on the drive has brought up old photos that were deleted, but the majority of the photos recovered are the same 4 images just written repeatedly, it wasn't been able to recover any of the photos that have been taken recently from what Gareth informed me.

 

The RAW image program might be worth a look, but I cant see what much else can be done with the card should that fail.