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Lost ALL Family Vacation pictures !


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Hello to all the pros in here...

I have had an electrical problem with my computer while the SD CARD from my camera along with 2 months of vacation pictures was plugged in the usb card reader.

When everything came back, nothing, there was a RAW partition instead of the FAT32 one, and windows asked to format. I said no and tried to recover using raw methods. To no avail, it took hours for nothing.

I have read similar threads in here, but since testdisk looks very complicated to me, and the data very valuable, and I know I have a one shot try at this, I decided to post my own thread with TESTDISK log.

If anyone of the pros who helped those happy people can help me in here, that would be Great.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Please see attached, the testdisk log file.

Best regards

testdisk.txt

Edited by JoeBarTeam78
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The log has nothing particularly "preoccupying" in it :) and, more than that you should know that there is in no way "a one shot".

Your next step, BEFORE anything else should be that of making a "dd-like" or "forensic sound" image of that card.

Then the recovery should be attempted (ideally) on a further copy of that image.

Suitable tools to make the image are dsfo (part of the DSFOK toolkit) if you are OK with command line or Datarescuedd (GUI) or CloneDisk (GUI):

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm

http://labalec.fr/erwan/?page_id=42

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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thanks for your reply jaclaz.

Since no one reply and I was making rounds like a crazy person getting worried, I tried something.

I put the Write lock on the card, and atempted to copy the file structure from the partition I found. Using the "c" button on testdisk.

Worked nicely...

There was a couple of videos ".mov" that were corrupted, don't know why...since the rest of the images where all there and I didn't touch the file structure in any way. Images in the same directory of the corrupted movies where fine.

Best regards

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Good. :)

It is very possible that the *whatever* issue was localized to the FAT structure and to the few .mov files that you found corrupted.

If they are important there are ways/tools to attempt recovering them "partially" (i.e. losing the correupted part(s) but recovering the "before" and "after" them.

jaclaz

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There are several programs that you can attempt using.

A couple:

Avidemux

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/AviDemux

Virtualdub:

http://www.virtualdub.org/

you will need a plugin for ,mov:

http://www.donsalva.com/2011/07/03/how-to-use-mkv-mp4-flv-mov-and-other-file-formats-with-virtualdub

Or even Defraser:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/defraser/

Which one (if any) might work "better" (or "at all" :ph34r:) is not possible to say in advance, when you are trying to recover "complex formats" it is mostly a "hit and miss" game.

Before that, I would anyway have a "second opinion" by using Photorec:

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

and a "third opinion" using DMDE:

http://dmde.com/

to recover those .mov files, it is very possible that the result will be similar or identical to what you managed to get with Testdisk, but you never know.

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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