Format Error! Images Lost! Recovered Giant MPG! WTF?!

May 16, 2008 12:34 PM

At the end of a badass and beautiful backpacking trip, my digital camera's memory card suddenly read "format error." My camera is a dinosaur Sony Cybershot with merely 3.2 megapixels. I downloaded Photorec and tried to recover the photos, but all I ended up with was a 13.9 Meg mpg file...

But I can't do anything with that mpg file. I have to admit a complete technological ignorance...operations of this sort are bewildering to me.

Anyone have any ideas? Are my images somehow recovered onto that mpg file? Is there any way to access them? HELP!!!!

posted by punkbitch to technology (4 comments total)

i had a similar problem. i used a program called zero assumption recovery to recover images from a corrupted SD card. it worked very well - but i had to buy an SD card reader in order to access the data.
posted by gnutron at 12:44 PM on May 16

Get this program. Worked for me . I have that camera.
PS ... don't take any more shots with that card until you complete your recovery efforts.
posted by Agamenticus at 1:00 PM on May 16

ooh, sorry, photorec is part of testdisc 6.9 that you linked to, agamenticus. that's how i retrieved the giant mpeg file... i don't know what to do with the giant mpeg file! i suspect it has my photos in it (it was the only file the program recovered and it is pretty sizeable).
posted by punkbitch at 4:01 PM on May 16

From a technical standpoint, I'd begin by binary searching the file for magic identifiers of whatever format your camera stores photos in (jpeg or raw). But 13.9 MB seems quite small though. How many pictures did you take? That aside, what's the memory card's capacity? You could be holding a complete disk dump of the card or—if you're lucky—just the file contents. Can you upload a chunk (like an MB) of the file somewhere? I can help you look into it.
posted by semi at 1:21 AM on May 17