The mp3 player ate my homework

July 16, 2006 4:37 PM

My cheapo mp3 player broke the win32 file system on my flash card, and so destroyed the pictures I had stored on it. How can I recover them?

Here is what I think happened.

I used the 1gig SD flash that I usually keep in my mp3 player to take some pictures, including one of the best sunset shot I ever did, looking down into the Newport Bridge. I brought the card back to the mp3 player to play some music, but when I put the card back into the camera to download the pictures to the computer, the pictures were gone.

Now, if I put the card back into the mp3 player, all sort of weirdness happens: directories with files as seen from Linux are empty as seen by the player.

I suspect the mp3 player is to blame. It is a cheap Lexar thing. The next thing I did was to make a dd backup of the file system, then run fsck, but it didn't report anything.

I've been googling for a Norton Diskedit clone for Linux, but I couldn't find anything. It would be great to go in the backup and see whether the pictures are still somewhere in there.

posted by gmarceau to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I found a program before that would scan flash media for JPG data (thus pictures that were not indexed by a filesystem). There was a free trial, and the trial would actually let you save an image the card itself, so that you could re-use the card and then recover your data after buying the real version (which isn't too expensive)

I think this is it, but I'm not sure. Looks similar.
posted by delmoi at 5:08 PM on July 16, 2006

It's not photo-oriented, but I've had good results with Restoration.
posted by djb at 5:22 PM on July 16, 2006

Here's an article addressing your question. It recommends a free tool. I haven't tried it, not having yet been in this situation, but the article praises it. Worth a try, anyway. Post a follow-up on the thread if you're successful.
posted by cacophony at 7:34 PM on July 16, 2006

Best answer: TestDisk & PhotoRec sound like the best bet.

Most file recovery software just looks for files marked as deleted by the file system. PhotoRec works at a lower level and can recover things when the file system is badly damaged. It also works on linux.
posted by Olli at 1:23 AM on July 17, 2006

Flash File Recovery may also be the program people are thinking of. I've seen a recommendation for one of these on... I don't remember where. Kenrockwell.com? photo.net? One of the DC review sites?

Damned if I can remember; I've been lucky so far.
posted by baylink at 7:26 AM on July 17, 2006

Response by poster: PC Inspector Smart Recovery spent the night reading my flash card and did not find anything. Restoration looked too amateur and I couldn't get it working.

I tried TestDisk & PhotoRec next, and it was wonderful. It worked off of my dd image file, and within five minutes it had recovered all the pictures.

I will post the sunset picture on flickr as soon as I get home.

Thanks everyone.
posted by gmarceau at 12:26 PM on July 17, 2006