# SD card error... recover photos?



## Libelita (Sep 27, 2008)

Hi! I am having a big problem... I've been using my 2 gb sd card for about a year now. The first problem it gave me was to stop holding 2 gb and start only accepting 1gb of memory (pics etc.). I don't remember when it started doing that, but if there is any easy way to fix that, please let me know! 

my newest problem is that when I put it into my USB 2.0 card driver (Lacor computer&imaging is the type...a cheap thing I bought about 2 years ago) and tried to attach it to the computer, it wouldnt read it. this has happened a few times i think just cuz the driver is old, but it usualy works if i just move it around a bit... when my comp finally recognized the driver, it said that I should format my card, but it would alow me to go into the pics. 

I didn't have time to copy them because I was called to lunch, but I left the driver in the computer. when I came back, the computer had gone into hybernate so I turned it back on and it was no longer recognizing the driver, so I took it out and plugged it back into the computer...still nothing. I did that about 4 times, then I found another card reader (MotionFlash 3 in 1 Card reader) and tried it in there. it gave me an error page and said that I had to format the card to try recover data, so I did. then when I went in to it again, it was completely empty, yet when I checked the storage space, it still says that there are 545MB in use...

My question is, are my pictures still on the card even thought I cant see them? if so, how can I access/recover them? is there any free software online, etc, I could use? and is there any way to recover the lost 1GB of space that just dissapeared?

Thanks for the help!


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## linskyjack (Aug 28, 2004)

The fact that your formatted it tells me that it will be very difficult to recover. You could always go to a service company to attempt a recovery, but that's very expensive.


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## mrss (Jun 13, 2007)

It may not be that dire. With my XP PC, I can format my SD and CF cards and my pictures can be recovered. It doesn't matter whether I click quick format or not. I can also format them in the camera and recover them. The only exception is if I choose the low level format in my Canon. That deletes the card 100%.

The original poster needs to get a card reader that isn't flaky though.You don't want to try recovery with a reader that's dropping data bits.

The two programs I use are mentioned in this thread.
http://forums.techguy.org/digital-photography-imaging/736020-sd-card-problems.html

You may have problems though if your card has something electrically wrong with it. The software works with cards that were erased by the user or perhaps formatted by mistake. Sometimes, a glitch will clear a whole sector in internal memory and that can't be recovered.

Good luck.


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