necrophyte

a weird thing happened with my olympus cam's xd card.. i wanted to copy the pics to a usb stick and obviously something happened and the explorer windows stopped responding. after terminating them and plugging out the card reader, the xd card became corrupted.

windows said the disk was not formatted. i thought, id format it and then recover the pics (just some few most recent ones) using a file recovery tool (www.recuva.com).

well, windows tried to format the card but didnt succeed. then i tried the same inside cmd - same thing.

then i booted from the windows 7 cd and formatted the drive there, which finally succeeded. after running recuva with all scan options checked, it found some 65k files, however, none of them were recoverable, and theyre zero-byte files, with no name (and no overwritten clusters).

tried also several other recovery tools, but no success (they didnt find anything, recuva did at least find these 65k zero-byte files).

so what happened? i managed to recover files after having formatted drives and usb sticks and sd cards many times before using recuva. is it possible that the windows 7 format function formats the drive with secure-delete enabled, like a file sanitizing tool?

or maybe a file system problem? the fs is fat32/16, i tried formatting the card to both file systems..

any hope?

thanks

mkk

Any risk that the format operation carried out was a full format and not just a quick one? A full format typically works over the entire space of a drive making file recovery basically impossible, though with flash media some bits and pieces can escape due to different internal workings.

necrophyte

i just went to the windows 7 installation, picked repair options > cmd and then format and the drive letter.

even a full format (quick format unchecked) through windows explorer doesnt overwrite each deleted/formatted sector again so that it becomes completely unrecoverable, only a governmental wipe or a file sanitizer (eg. HP file sanitizer) with 8 or more passes does that.

so this is not the problem. as said before, i already managed to recover numerous files after doing a full format of usb sticks etc., even after the files had already been deleted manually from the stick, so the only possibility is that the format function inside the windows 7 repair cmd (former recovery console) does such a secure wipe (but why does recuva find 65k files then? this actually already excludes this possibility imo...).

..or, which i think is the case, something with the file system happened, and therefore the files are unrecoverable now, as recuva finds 65k of them, but all zero-byte and without any attributes (no name, dates, size, location etc.) due to the fs corruption.

mkk

A single pass is enough to foil any user software based attempt to restore files from a harddrive(the original reason for using several passes had to do with early drive hardware or controllers behaving erratically), but I guess it's possible that a full format is or at least in some cases has been less effective. There is an optional wiping switch to the format command in Windows 7, but I don't see why it would be invoked by default. Anyway a quick format is what should be used here.

RoyBatty

I always do the recovery before formating the card. I don't know the Recuva software, but the programs I use at work can read the cards even if windows say it's not formated.

necrophyte

which software do you use that is able to read the card although windows says its not formatted and dos says its RAW?

recuva is made by the same company as ccleaner is and i really have very good experience with it. it manages to find lots more files with all scan features enabled than other such software i tried (i tried lots of them).

ok its not that important as these were just a few new pics i took that arent that important, but i am curious why there was absolutely nothing recoverable anymore after one single format, just some 65k zero-byte, no-name, no-attributes files..

RoyBatty

One of the programs is Hama Photorescue, I don't remember the name of the other one, but I'll tell you tomorrow.

RoyBatty

So I looked at the programs, they are Hama PhotoRescue PC, which is PhotoRescue with added Hama logo and the other one is Sandisk RescuePRO 3.0. From these two programs (but I think they are both at least a year old versions) the Sandisk usually recovers slightly more files.