Recovery Force® Data Recovery Forum

Greetings from Cyprus.

I'm retired and currently aboard our sailing vessel sitting tight in the eastern Mediterranean for the winter.

I'm by no means anything more than a novice computer user but it does seem that I run into a few 'situations' here and there that I can be of assistance with. To that end I do pack along a few external drive adapters and a couple of software packages for data recovery.

For the most part, things work and since I'm not an expert I don't even try to dig into anything that would resemble a serious data recovery effort. Still, it's nice when I run into (figuratively) another sailor who has a computer problem I can help with (and it's a good feeling when data reappears!)

So, when I ran into today's particular problem I started seeking out a place where I might get better educated or seek some real expertise to bounce around.

I hope it's ok to just land here and seek advice; I don't think, after reading the posts here, that I will have much to contribute because of my 'level'.

So, if it IS an ok thing to start chasing down a problem I'll spill the story but if it isn't cool (after all, I see this as a "pro-to-pro" board) then I'll gladly wave off with best wishes for everyone.

Thanks for adding me to the board!

Best wishes,

Gary W
s/v Adagio
Larnaca, Cyprus

Welcome to the forum. Feel free to ask away.

Well .. first off, thanks for the welcome

Next, I just downloaded and used R-Undelete successfully where another recovery program, which I had a lot of respect for, had failed to do so.

So, the problem is basically solved; my files (basically irreplaceable photos) are salvaged and backed up now. R-Undelete was pretty simple to figure out and it worked very well on the first pass. Thanks to the good folks who make it!

So, for my learning experience at least, here's the scenario:
Nikon D7100, 64Gb of SanDisk Pixtor 80. About 725 pictures aboard at 5 to 10Mb each.

I took the card out of the camera to back up the day's shoot (about 210 photos) and plugged it into the card reader, a Targus six-in-one reader (not a really good one, but it's been reliable for about 6 months now). Windows 10 laptop, Windows "Photos" a default previewer program.

Drive (SD Card) came up ok and displayed the files fine. At this point I usually just back them up to the external drive right away, but I wanted to preview a couple of them because I thought I might have a couple of money shots. As I was previewing through .. scrolling kind of quickly, actually, I got a message saying that the Photos program could not display the file .... I thought that was weird, but it was even weirder when I backed up one slide and couldn't display it either, even though I had just done so! No more files were displayable via Photos or anything else. Windows displayed the "You need to format this thing before you can use it" message followed by the "unrecognized file system" message.

OK, so far so good ... all is not lost.

I loaded GDB (is it ok to use that name around here?? and it ran the analysis for a couple of hours and came back with the file system as eXFAT (true) and the drive size as 59.4Gb .. which is a bit light for this card. I plugged it into a Mac to see if it would read it and it showed 63.8GB, but unreadable and 0byte available.

Ge Data Back showed and recovered about 300 files. The directory had a really weird entry .. let me see if I can explain ...

the files (photos) were numbered up to about 2800
at 2425 the file number jumped to 2489 but the 2489 filename included a .tmp extension. The really odd part was that the file was time stamped a day and a half from now ... every other file name was 12/12 but this one was 12/14 .. the PC's clock and the camera's clock were both good.
Nevertheless, the remaining files were not visible ... except for the very last one, number 2845 which was time stamped 12/12.

I was pretty close to starting to write down hex in a last ditch effort to edit this weirdness out and try to re-establish a chain somehow (and believe me it would have been pure blind luck) but decided to go to the internet and see if I could find data recovery advice.

Well, I ended up here, used R-Undelete successfully and am here to tell the tale. BUT .. I truly don't understand what happened with the creation of a .tmp file in the future and how it blocked the directory and files further on down the line ... except for the last one.

I did see that the .tmp file had a sector offset of 16, but I don't now what that mean except that the other were zero.

Got my photos back, I'm happy.

The End.

Most data recovery pros use the big brother to R-Undelete, R-Studio. So, we are all quite aware of how powerful it can be. I'm glad that you have been successful with that project. The R-Studio team are members of the forum...so, who knows, they may post a comment here too.