Smart Card Failure

[Bacchus]

Thought I would share some valuable info. After returning from FP on Sunday, I was downloading my pics from the several smart media cards I had taken on my trip. One of the cards faulted and showed that there weren't any images on it. I knew that I had almost 100 shots on that card and it contained some of my favorite shots from the trip. I went to the largest camera shop in town (Wolf Camera) where they tried to access the card. The guys there told me "sometimes this happens with smart media". Unfortunately they had no way to get the pictures if the card read as empty. I came home depressed and started looking through the web for data recovery services.

Long story short....there is software that can read disk drives, cd's and smart media cards that either have been erased or somehow have faulted. (as long as they haven't been reformatted!) The company that I found is dtidata. www.dtidata.com. They emailed me the software ($49.99) and I was able to pull all but 2 pictures off of the card.

If you do find that you have a corrupted card, don't reformat it...get the software to get it read!

 

[Dee]

What brand SM card was it? I've heard of this happening with some of the 'off' brands. Glad to know there's a way to retrieve them, though.

Makes me doubly glad Santa brought me a new laptop!

BTW...how many pictures did you take on your trip?

 

[Bacchus]

YOu're right, it did suck, but at least I got it taken care of. A tense couple of hours though. Anyway....the smart media is a SanDisk. I thought it was pretty reputable. Maybe just my bad luck!

Anyway I took somewhere around 400 shots underwater and another 100 or so overwater. out of the u/w I would imagine that there are some good enough to be proud of. I really haven't had the time to go through them on screen and sort them out. MAybe this weekend.

 

[Dee]

Sandisk is supposed to be very realiable. I have 3 myself but haven't had any problems so far.

On my first trip with my 4040, I took almost 800 pics...topside and u/w. I had some really good ones, better odds than I ever had with film. It took me over a week to go through and sort them out.

Good Luck!

 

[Titletowndiver]

Im in the process of (for lack of a better term) "fixing up" an old laptop. My plan is to hook a card reader up and upload my photos daily to try and avoid that same situation! You are very fortunate that you lost only 2 photos! <whew!!!!!> I figure if I can back them up to the harddrive of the PC i'll at least have some protection if the card fails or in the event the camera gets damaged (or flooded eek;-0 ). I use a variety of different compact flash cards and I honestly haven't seen a difference in any specific name brand. I have generic cards that work as well as my Sandisks.

Take Care! And thanks for that link

 

[Bacchus]

I will probably start to travel with my laptop again. With weight restrictions on a lot of the inter Island flights I didn't want to lug it around.

Also, I took 400 shots of vineyards (I'm in the wine biz) last year in Spain. Downloaded them every night and cataloged them into folders. Last day in Madrid and someone stole my laptop at the airport! Lost them all. I guess anyway you do it, you just have to be careful. There are also compact storage units (basically just a seperate little hard drive) that you can download directly onto. They're only about $199 and are very useful. With that you can't view your pictures at night though. Oh, what to do?

 

[Dee]

Bacchus once bubbled...
There are also compact storage units (basically just a seperate little hard drive) that you can download directly onto. They're only about $199 and are very useful. With that you can't view your pictures at night though. Oh, what to do?

I've been going back and forth with the question of storage since I got my camera. My old laptop was on it's last legs...and has since died a fiery death. I looked into the various HD storage devices but never really found any that I liked. Well, the ones that appealed to me weren't affordable! One of the advantages of digital is getting to see your results immediate and I wanted to utilize that and inspect my pictures every day to I could correct mistakes. So it really wasn't a hard decision to replace the laptop. Now if I could just figure out XP I'll be set!

 

[Titletowndiver]

someone stole my laptop at the airport!

Sheeesh! No offense but you've got really shi**y luck! HEH

 

[DivingGal]

sorry of your hard luck.

I've just bought a digital (land only as I wanted to try it out, and get better at the surface)

I can tell I've got a long way to go......


The info and your tale of woe, is useful! Glad you were able to recover most of your pics.

 

[Bacchus]

Dee once bubbled...
Makes me doubly glad Santa brought me a new laptop!

Dee....have you been peeking under the tree?:nono: :nono: :nono: