Recently I took a series of pictures on my old Vivitar vivi cam camera. They
were successful but I haven't saved them to disk yet.

Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the only sunflower in our garden and
grabbed the Vivi cam because I didn't want to miss the hoverfly on the
flower.

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't know
what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose those other
pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

Mary
(I changed the card and got the hoverfly so it's not the camera)

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:

Recently I took a series of pictures on my old Vivitar vivi cam camera. They
were successful but I haven't saved them to disk yet.

Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the only sunflower in our garden and
grabbed the Vivi cam because I didn't want to miss the hoverfly on the
flower.

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't know
what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose those other
pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

Mary
(I changed the card and got the hoverfly so it's not the camera)


Firstly save the images from the card to your PC ( if you can)....If
not then you'll only be able to get them by using software like Photo
Rescue ( which is excellent but costs a few quid) .It has saved my
bacon ( and "lost" images) a few times .There is a free version but
I'm not sure if it is a fully working version ..
http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

There are also free versions of recovery software like
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

which apparently has a free tool.

but not all work properly and some have a watermark over the images
recovered unless you pay for the full version .
Once you have done that format the card . You could try using someone
elses camera to see what happens .

On 03/09/2008 16:16, Mary Fisher wrote:

Recently I took a series of pictures on my old Vivitar vivi cam camera. They
were successful but I haven't saved them to disk yet.

Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the only sunflower in our garden and
grabbed the Vivi cam because I didn't want to miss the hoverfly on the
flower.

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't know
what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose those other
pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

Some free and open-source software should help you out

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

On Sep 3, 4:16*pm, "Mary Fisher" wrote:
Recently I took a series of pictures on my old Vivitar vivi cam camera. They
were successful but I haven't saved them to disk yet.

Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the only sunflower in our garden and
grabbed the Vivi cam because I didn't want to miss the hoverfly on the
flower.

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't know
what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose those other
pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

Mary
(I changed the card and got the hoverfly so it's not the camera)

Once you've recovered whatever files you can, and formatted the card,
I'd check it to see if its still ok before reuse. These flash cards do
have limited life. It also might just be a bit of dirt on the
contacts, it may be fine once is back in.

Frequent backing up is the only way to hang on to your files.


NT

"Andy Burns" wrote in message
news
On 03/09/2008 16:16, Mary Fisher wrote:

Recently I took a series of pictures on my old Vivitar vivi cam camera.
They were successful but I haven't saved them to disk yet.

Yesterday I wanted to take a picture of the only sunflower in our garden
and
grabbed the Vivi cam because I didn't want to miss the hoverfly on the
flower.

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know
what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose those
other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

Some free and open-source software should help you out

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Thank you, I'll try it after dinner - with crossed fingers :-)

Mary

On 03/09/2008 17:02, Mary Fisher wrote:

Thank you, I'll try it after dinner - with crossed fingers :-)

The instructions may look a bit scary as it's a "DOS" type program not a
graphical interface but, as it says, it only ever reads from the card
and writes recovered files elsewhere, so can't make things worse than
they are already.

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.

Then see if you can read it in the camera, it might just be a bit of muck
on contact, check them on the card and when putting it back in the camera
seat it a few times to clean the camera contacts. If the camera still
refuses to read the card can you stick it in a reader in your PC? Can that
read it, if not there are many bits of software out there that can recover
faulty discs.
--
Cheers
Dave.

On 3 Sep, 16:39, Andy Burns wrote:

Some free and open-source software should help you out

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Seconded - it saved my bacon on Monday evening. To give you an idea of
how long it takes, it ploughed through my 2GB SD card in about 50
minutes, but it got everything A-OK!

"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.net...
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.

They don't actually stop things writing to the card.
They aren't even switches and the card doesn't know which position its in.
They rely on the reader looking at the position and the software taking any
notice.

"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.net...
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.

I have done that - now :-) Horses nd doors come to mind ...

Then see if you can read it in the camera, it might just be a bit of muck
on contact, check them on the card and when putting it back in the camera
seat it a few times to clean the camera contacts.

That doesn't work.

If the camera still
refuses to read the card can you stick it in a reader in your PC? Can that
read it, if not there are many bits of software out there that can recover
faulty discs.

I've tried reading it with the card reader, it shows it as having no files
in the folder - yet the folder is there. I've tried saving the folder's
contents in various ways but nothing happens.

I'll be trying the suggested software but not tonight now, too late. It's
downloaded and rarin' to go :-)

Thanks to everyone. I'll let you know.

Mary

On 3 Sep, 19:55, "Mary Fisher" wrote:
"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message

ll.net...

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.

I have done that - now :-) Horses nd doors come to mind ...



Then see if you can read it in the camera, it might just be a bit of muck
on contact, check them on the card and when putting it back in the camera
seat it a few times to clean the camera contacts.

That doesn't work.

If the camera still
refuses to read the card can you stick it in a reader in your PC? Can that
read it, if not there are many bits of software out there that can recover
faulty discs.

I've tried reading it with the card reader, it shows it as having no files
in the folder - yet the folder is there. I've tried saving the folder's
contents in various ways but nothing happens.

I'll be trying the suggested software but not tonight now, too late. It's
downloaded and rarin' to go :-)

Thanks to everyone. I'll let you know.

Mary

Mary
I had a card that I couldn't recover anything from with a number of
programs. The one that did it for me was this :

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

It's Russian - not in Russian fortunately - but is very effective.
Rob

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 19:46:16 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

They don't actually stop things writing to the card.
They aren't even switches and the card doesn't know which position its
in. They rely on the reader looking at the position and the software
taking any notice.

Even so better than leaving it write enabled. Even if it is the reader
that does the write inhibit it'll be in the readers firmware and I would
expect all normal writes to the card to be blocked. It may be possible to
write a special program to override it but that is a different kettle of
fish.

--
Cheers
Dave.

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 19:55:57 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:


"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ill.net...
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.

I have done that - now :-) Horses nd doors come to mind ...

Then see if you can read it in the camera, it might just be a bit of muck
on contact, check them on the card and when putting it back in the camera
seat it a few times to clean the camera contacts.

That doesn't work.

If the camera still
refuses to read the card can you stick it in a reader in your PC? Can that
read it, if not there are many bits of software out there that can recover
faulty discs.

I've tried reading it with the card reader, it shows it as having no files
in the folder - yet the folder is there.

Hmm - even without the 'correct' software I'd have thought that
Windows Explorer would have shown if any files were there, even if it
couldn't decipher them.

Do you know what the file extensions from your camera are called?

Can you alter the picture file output in the camera, such as .jpg or
..raw or whatever?

If it's .jpg then virtually any photo software should be quite capable
of dealing with it.

--
Frank Erskine

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:08:28 +0100, Frank Erskine wrote:

Hmm - even without the 'correct' software I'd have thought that
Windows Explorer would have shown if any files were there, even if it
couldn't decipher them.

Depends what has happened to the card. I'm not exactly how they work but
there will be some form of "file allocation table" if that gets corupted
then it's quite likely that no filenames will show but the data of those
files still exists on the media. The rescue programs copy the device block
by block and these days are quite clever at recognising the data
construction within files and putting the blocks back together in the
right order. Some manual intervention maybe still be required, a lot
depends on how fragmented the files are on the device.

--
Cheers
Dave.

Frank Erskine wrote:
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 19:55:57 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:

"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.net...
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?
If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.
I have done that - now :-) Horses nd doors come to mind ...
Then see if you can read it in the camera, it might just be a bit of muck
on contact, check them on the card and when putting it back in the camera
seat it a few times to clean the camera contacts.
That doesn't work.

If the camera still
refuses to read the card can you stick it in a reader in your PC? Can that
read it, if not there are many bits of software out there that can recover
faulty discs.
I've tried reading it with the card reader, it shows it as having no files
in the folder - yet the folder is there.

Hmm - even without the 'correct' software I'd have thought that
Windows Explorer would have shown if any files were there, even if it
couldn't decipher them.


Not necessarily.

If teh directory entrys are buggered, teh data will be there, but not
show up as a file.

Do you know what the file extensions from your camera are called?

Can you alter the picture file output in the camera, such as .jpg or
.raw or whatever?

If it's .jpg then virtually any photo software should be quite capable
of dealing with it.


I dont think thats the point.


Oh. Mary..one pice of advice that I got from a site when trying to get
to grips with my new camera was to

(a) re format the cards every time you clear them on download.

(b) Never ever disconnect teh crads until a few seconds after switching
thngs off..flah memory is a bitch to write to, and takes considerable
time to update the actual card..

(c) dont expect a flash card will last forever: there area limited
number of read/write cycles that they will do.

I suspect you are suffering from (b). The boring technical detail is teh
flah ram by and large can be written in small blocks, but has to be
eraed in huge chunks before you can write it in the first place. So you
may have erased the directory entry, and then pulled the card before it
got rewritten. The actual file DATA will be there mostly, but you have
lost the directory..

A good file recovery program MAY be able to stitch that lot back
together..but be prepared for disappointment.

In message et, Dave
Liquorice writes
If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.
Unfortunately that's not the case, the 'hardware' switch on an SD card
is just a flag that operates a switch in the card slot. Even if this is
in the write protect position it won't stop data being corrupted or
going corrupt if the flash card or reader is at fault.

--
Clint Sharp

On Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:08:28 +0100, Frank Erskine
wrote:

On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 19:55:57 +0100, "Mary Fisher"
wrote:


"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
hill.net...
On Wed, 3 Sep 2008 16:16:51 +0100, Mary Fisher wrote:

An error message I've never seen came up - 'format error' - and I don't
know what to do. Of course I could format the card but then I'd lose
those other pictures.

Can anyone advise, please?

If it has a hardware switch to prevent data writes operate it to the
"write protect" position. This should prevent any data loss by the card or
other things unexpected or incorrectly.

I have done that - now :-) Horses nd doors come to mind ...

Then see if you can read it in the camera, it might just be a bit of muck
on contact, check them on the card and when putting it back in the camera
seat it a few times to clean the camera contacts.

That doesn't work.

If the camera still
refuses to read the card can you stick it in a reader in your PC? Can that
read it, if not there are many bits of software out there that can recover
faulty discs.

I've tried reading it with the card reader, it shows it as having no files
in the folder - yet the folder is there.

Hmm - even without the 'correct' software I'd have thought that
Windows Explorer would have shown if any files were there, even if it
couldn't decipher them.

Not necessarily. There are files explorer will not show even if show
all files is enabled. Booting a Linux live CD and browsing from that
can often show them.

Assuming W2000 or XP
try opening WE and going to C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local
Settings\Temporary Internet Files\

Delete all the cookies.
Then add on the end of the address \content.IE5

Suddenly a number of folders will appear

Do you know what the file extensions from your camera are called?

Can you alter the picture file output in the camera, such as .jpg or
.raw or whatever?

If it's .jpg then virtually any photo software should be quite capable
of dealing with it.

On Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:30:15 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

(b) Never ever disconnect teh crads until a few seconds after switching
thngs off..flah memory is a bitch to write to, and takes considerable
time to update the actual card..

Yeah, wait until all the blinken lights have stopped blinken. Before even
thinking about removing or disturbing the card. Batteries going flat a
crucial moment have also know to corrupt a card.

Yesterday I couldn't find the reference in another place to software that
has been used to good effect by others. Today a similar query has been
asked in the other place and there is free(*) recovery software on the
SanDisk site somewhere.

(*) I can't actually find it, I can find Rescue Pro 3.2 and Rescue Pro
Delux 4.0 but they are US$40.00 though there is some mention of a "special
price" for SanDisk customers and some hoops to jump through.

--
Cheers
Dave.

On Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:07:16 +0100 (BST), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:

On Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:30:15 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

(b) Never ever disconnect teh crads until a few seconds after switching
thngs off..flah memory is a bitch to write to, and takes considerable
time to update the actual card..

Yeah, wait until all the blinken lights have stopped blinken. Before even
thinking about removing or disturbing the card. Batteries going flat a
crucial moment have also know to corrupt a card.

Yesterday I couldn't find the reference in another place to software that
has been used to good effect by others. Today a similar query has been
asked in the other place and there is free(*) recovery software on the
SanDisk site somewhere.

(*) I can't actually find it, I can find Rescue Pro 3.2 and Rescue Pro
Delux 4.0 but they are US$40.00 though there is some mention of a "special
price" for SanDisk customers and some hoops to jump through.

I can vouch for Photo Rescue .I've had it for years and it has saved
my bacon a few times .
I'm wondering if Mary has succeeeded in her quest .No word yet .!!

On Thu, 4 Sep 2008 14:36:22 +0100, Clint Sharp wrote:

Unfortunately that's not the case, the 'hardware' switch on an SD card
is just a flag that operates a switch in the card slot. Even if this is
in the write protect position it won't stop data being corrupted or
going corrupt if the flash card or reader is at fault.

But it will stop a normally working reader attempting to write data to the
card, almost certainly over stuff that could otherwise be recovered. It's
not perfect but it is another level of protection to the data you want
back, so why not use it?

--
Cheers
Dave.

"Dave Liquorice" wrote in message
ll.net...
On Thu, 4 Sep 2008 14:36:22 +0100, Clint Sharp wrote:

Unfortunately that's not the case, the 'hardware' switch on an SD card
is just a flag that operates a switch in the card slot. Even if this is
in the write protect position it won't stop data being corrupted or
going corrupt if the flash card or reader is at fault.

But it will stop a normally working reader attempting to write data to the
card, almost certainly over stuff that could otherwise be recovered. It's
not perfect but it is another level of protection to the data you want
back, so why not use it?

No it won't.
The readers are also pretty dumb and its the software that has to take
notice.
Something not all software does do.