James Fee
12-02-2004, 04:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1734114,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1734114,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"I popped out the SanDisk Compact Flash card and brought it down to the PC in my basement. I stuck it in the flash-card reader and waited. Normally the card prompts an autorun and Microsoft Windows XP asks me, among other choices, if I want to view a slide show or the contents of the disk. This time, nothing happened. I pulled out the card and put it back in. Again, nothing. I opened the My Computer icon on the PC and then selected Drive E, the drive letter for the flash disk. It opened the disk and in it was a DCIM folder. I selected that, expecting to see my eight JPG image files. Instead, it was empty. I closed the directory and drive listing on the PC, took out the card and brought it back upstairs. I then put it back in the camera. I turned on the camera. There's an LCD on top of the camera that, along with shot settings, tells me how many photos I can still take. When the card is empty, it says 90. In this case, it said 82. But when I switched the camera to "Play" to try to view the shots on the card on the LCD, the camera reported that there were no images to view. I know that these were just photos and that I can always get another shot of my kids in the leaves, but I really felt like I had caught a moment and hated the idea of losing the images."</i><br /><br />There is no worse feeling than losing a picture you've taken on a CF card. This PC Magazine article has a freeware solution called <a href="http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm">Zero Assumption Recovery</a> which might be one of those utilites you always keep around, "just in case".