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Data Recovery

maybe you can help me with this mystery that so far no one ive talked to had a clue what to do

my wife and i took some fotos on a digital camera 3.2 meg pixel to be exact and afterwards we downloaded a few of them onto my pc then while going thru the pix i did not want and deleting them i made a error and erased all the pixs on the camera memory chip BUT I did not reformat the chip then i downloaded the ontrack digital recovery program from the net and actually did recover all the photos BUT the recovered photos are in thumbnail size and totally unusable. what to do?? supposedly there is a way to recover all the digital photos off the cameras memory chip but i have run out of things to try.

the memory chip is a: fujinon xD-Picture Card 64MB about the size of a thumbnail. any insights?

Ron Morrisette
Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:29:12 -0500

It's good that you had not formatted the memory card. It's also good that you found a software to undelete those pictures. You are already aware of how to recover data on storage.

Make sure you do not write anything to that memory card until you have recovered all your pictures, or gaved up on recovering your pictures. If you have wrote to it, it is very possible that you have written over some of your precious data.

Generally, when you shoot a picture with a digital camera, it store the picture in two different files: one thumbnail and one full-size image. The thumbnail is used by the camera to display the content of the image quickly to the LCD.

It sounds to me that the software you downloaded was only able to recover the thumbnail files for you. If that is the case, you may want to try another software.

There may be another possibility. Generally, a file is deleted by erasing the first character in the file name. An undelete software may restore that file by putting a random character in that place.

If you are looking at the pictures via your camera, yoru camera may not recognize the new random character as a standard image file that creates, therefore, ignores it. The best thing to do, while recovering your images, is to use an independant memory card reader.

Hope this helps.

Chieh Cheng
Thu Feb 26 11:14:14 PST 2004

Chieh do you know of another software that can recover the larger full size images ? Iv looked on the net about this a little further and there are some places on the net that do a "special" recovery for a fee and these services are located in london and other cities in the UK but having no way to follow up after wards meaning recourse if the chip gets lost id like to find some software that can do the recovery maybe you know what is the best software for this?

Ron Morrisette
Thu, 26 Feb 2004 14:51:25 -0500

Unfortunately, I do not have any experience with these software or services that recovers data on memory cards.

My explanation is based purely on my background in Computer Science and my understanding of how file allocation table (FAT) works on mass storage devices, which the memory card uses.

I only have experience with undelete utilities that came bundled with DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Norton Utilities. But the last time I used these tools are back in the 90's.

I suggest that you look at the file content of the memory card via a memory card reader, rather than through your camera. You may find that the files are already there and that you can open them with your graphics software.

Chieh Cheng
Thu Feb 26 13:47:41 PST 2004

Just wanted to let you know. If you haven't found anything yet I have one for you to try. www.lc-tech.com
I recently deleted a photo from my digital media card. I sent my media card to the company in FL and they recovered the photo. This was after I had already taken it to a photo recovery place locally here in MI and had been told it was just gone. These guys are amazing. They do allow you to purchase their software online. The nice thing about when I sent it in was that it was risk free. If they couldn't recover my data, I didn't pay anything. Give them I try, I highly recommend them. That's why I'm posting this. I swore when they recovered my picture I would post this to help others. i really thought my picture was gone & since it was an irreplaceable photo of my 10 month old son in the mountains of Massachusetts I was totally devestated. They're wizards! Give them a try.

Jenn

Jennifer
Fri Jun 25 21:46:07 PDT 2004

Hi
I know that,post is very old but i want to give some suggestion about photo recovery.
You can use stellar phoenix Photo recovery software which is great way to find your lost photo's.Great software ....

josuf
Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:42:26 +0000

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