File recovery from a Compact Flash

[mtdmitchell]

My wife is a photographer she has used a Sony camera on and off for about a year along with a 16 GB Kingston compact flash card. Today she does a shoot at the studio, checking the pics on the camera as she works -get's home and attempts to load the Raw files to the pc as usual...but no no files on the card. when viewing the card though my computer is states 11.5 GB free of 14GB.

 

opening the card in explorer shows no files,so i check it in disk management the drives displays as 15GB and healthy (FAT32)!!

 

i have so far tried lots of different freeware recovery software tools, but i cannot find the files from the shoot today- weirdly i can recover files from months ago and up to a few days ago.

 

i dont understand why this card is displaying used space but nothing there!

 

when i run chkdsk /f i get

 

convert lost chains to files Y/N

 

i select yes and get

 

insufficient disk space to recover lost data

windows found problems with the file system that could not be corrected

 

any ideas to what i should try next?

Edited July 22, 2010 by mtdmitchell

[PiqueABoo]

Be warned that this isn't easy to use, but it has perfectly recovered stuff for me from someone's broken USB stick when none of the several obvious shiny GUI-based utils I tried managed to do anything.

 

PhotoRec

 

Note: It does read-only access to the target copying recovered stuff elsewhere, so you're not going to cause any more damage experimenting with it.

[mtdmitchell]

WOW..i take my hat of to you, that worked first time. I cant thank you enough.....I owe u one.

[Dess314]

WOW..i take my hat of to you, that worked first time. I cant thank you enough.....I owe u one.

 

Hat's off to mtdmitchell. Who knew such a simple and effective program works! Even though you posted back in 2010, thank you so much for this. You just saved my friend's USB with over 200 priceless photos. Thank you!