Invisible card?

[Minky]

Hoping someone can help

 

I took some irreplacable pictures on Saturday on my camera using an SDHC memory card and tried to download them but to no avail. I moved the card to another camera where it said card not formatted. I didn't want to format it as I wasn't sure of the result.

 

I took the card out the camera and put it into a USB card reader into the laptop. It shows in My Computer as a Removable Disk (F:) but that's just for the reader. It says there is nothing in it. I tried to run recuva against the drive choosing the option to recover non deleted files and came up with The parameter is incorrect.

 

I took the card out and followed the instructions to format it on my camera to see if that would help and still nothing when i re run recuva.

How come the card is invisible? When I've put the card back into the camera it now comes up with Card Error when it worked perfectly fine when I was taking pictures.

 

Can anyone help please??

[DennisD]

Hi Minky, and welcome to Piriform.

 

I'm not sure how uptodate the card reader is you have, but it'll need to be very recent to be able to read High Capacity SD Cards. Most PC's will just hang trying to read them.

 

A lot of folk are finding them to be a pain in the backside, as they had no idea a High Capacity reader would be needed. My daughter being one, as we have to connect her camera to the PC with a USB cable to transfer her pictures over.

 

The problem is that formatting the card will have made recovery nigh on impossible. And if your card reader isn't compatible with HCSD, then Recuva won't be able to read it anyway.

 

Try connecting via USB cable if your camera has that output feature, and Windows will be able to read the card through your camera. Whether Recuva could do that I have no idea as I've never tried it.

 

I'm sorry I couldn't be more positive.

[Minky]

I've got a card reader directly in my laptop and a standalone USB one too and they both recognise my other SDHC card fine and I've down loaded the photos from that but nothing at all for the 'damaged' one.

My laptop doesn't see the card either through the camera either via a USB - it's as if it doesn't exist.

 

Any other ideas on recovery?

[DennisD]

I'm sorry I don't, but other guys on here may do, so check in for a few days as guys are on different time zones.

 

From what you say after formatting the card in your camera, it could simply be that the card itself has developed a fault. It doesn't help with your problem I'm sorry to say, but if it's a recent card, maybe back to where you bought it.

 

Sorry I couldn't help, but I sure as hell sympathise with your predicament.

[Minky]

Cheers anyway - I'm off to go and cry in the corner now at the lost photo's

[hirshthg]

Cheers anyway - I'm off to go and cry in the corner now at the lost photo's

I had a problem like that, but the problem was my computer's card reader. I got a (universal) usb port card reader (targus) at radio shack ($19.99) and it reads all the cards I have. maybe that would work for you. Does you computer read from the card when you used the other camera?

[DennisD]

There's maybe one other thing you could try Minky, although with formatting your card and having an error warning with it, it may not help but anything is worth a shot.

 

Have a look at this post from a while back about a freeware app called Test Disk.

 

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?s=&amp...st&p=121134

 

The links are still OK and it's worth a shot.

[Minky]

Cheers for that.

 

Downloaded and it scared the bejesus outta me - definately getting in the realms of 'no idea what i'm doing here'

 

However, I did run it and opened test disk and Rhoto rec but both only came up with one option under 'Select a media' which I'm guessing is the laptop at 120gb. No identification of a USB flash drive when I put a card in the USB reader or when I put the disk directly in the laptop reader.

 

Thanks for the help and the suggestions tho.