Re: [gentoo-user] testing a corrupt SD card

[Paul Hartman]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@××××××××××××.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-02-06 at 19:36 -0600, Paul Hartman wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Iain Buchanan <iaindb@××××××××××××.au> wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > recently my SD card just went bonkers.  Unfortunately I lost a lot of
>> > photos on it (backups are useless until the data actually gets to the
>> > backup...) but fortunately I was able to use a program to recover about
>> > 170 photos.
>> >
>> > Anyway, I don't know if it was just static, shock, dead card, or phase
>> > of the moon, so I would like to see if the card is good before I
>> > continue to use it.
>>
>> With any kind of memory or storage device, I would stop using after
>> the first sign of a problem. My personal experience says it only gets
>> worse. :)
>>
>> Lexar has a free program for recovering corrupted/deleted files from
>> their cards, did you use that? Or something linux-based like photorec?
>> Anyway, you wrote over it so it's too late now. :)
>
> Now you tell me there are free versions?!  I ended up finding a photo
> recovery tool which recovered the photos for me, but it wasn't "free".
> Needless to say I didn't pay for it, and I deleted it straight away.

Actually, the Lexar Image Rescue software costs USD$33.95, but "will
be available for free download with purchase of any new 2007 Lexar
Professional or Platinum II line CompactFlash or Secure Digital memory
card."

Also, I just learned that Lexar will do professional data recovery for
FREE on Lexar cards (if you mail them in). Apparently it is
unadvertised benefit geared mostly toward professional photographers
who cannot afford to lose their work, so if you had files other than
photos on the card they probably wouldn't deal with them. I don't know
if Lexar AU could do it or if you'd need to send it to the USA. Let's
hope you never have to deal with that situation again. :)

> I'll check out photorec next time.  I'm having a hard time finding info
> about it though (see previous email about draconian internet access).

A description from the web:

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files
including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and
lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera
memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying
data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been
severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is
distributed under GNU Public License. PhotoRec is a companion program
to TestDisk, an app for recovering lost partitions on a wide variety
of filesystems and making non-bootable disks bootable again. You can
download them from this link.

For more safety, PhotoRec uses read-only access to handle the drive or
memory support you are about to recover lost data from. Important: As
soon as a pic or file is accidentally deleted, or you discover any
missing, do NOT save any more pics or files to that memory device or
hard disk drive; otherwise you may overwrite your lost data. This
means that even using PhotoRec, you must not choose to write the
recovered files to the same partition they were stored on.

> Is there a general linux version of FAT recovery tools available
> somewhere?  I couldn't find one.

Well, other than fsck I'm familiar with DFSee. It is not free, but it
is shareware with a trial period (good if you only need to use it once
in a pinch), and it has a Linux (and DOS,Windows, Mac and OS/2)
version as well as bootable ISO. I've used it for many years and had
some success stories. I registered it back in the olden days (version
2 or 3 or so), now it's up to v9. http://www.dfsee.com/

Again, hoping you never have to use such a thing!
Paul