17 Nov
2011
17 Nov
'11
8:58 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-
bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of David Riley
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 8:40 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: (OT) SmartMedia un-erasing - help?
On Nov 17, 2011, at 11:30 AM, Mark Tapley wrote:
> All,
> I have a 128 MB Smart Media card from my camera which I
> inadvertently formatted, erasing a whole pile of really good photos
> from Yellowstone Park, in mid-June 2009. It recently re-surfaced in
> my pile of things to do.
>
> 1) Is there any hope at all that the original images are recoverable?
>
> 2) Any recommendations on where to go to get that done?
>
[snip]
I guess it's possible... does SmartMedia format as FAT[12|16|32]? A lot of
DOS "unerase" programs might do the trick if the camera just blows away the
header blocks of the filesystem; often times the directories are left more or
less intact.
[> ]
The format should be determined by the camera, rather than as an attribute of the media.
If it is FAT (and I've yet to see a digital camera that doesn't use FAT): I had a
similar experience with a CompactFlash card and I was able to recover the images with DOS
Chkdsk.
Probably a good idea to make a backup image of the card before you do any
experiments, though. If you have access to a UNIX-y machine that can
access the card, dd should do the job. I don't know what to use on Windows.
I very much agree that making an image backup before you do anything like that is a very
good idea. If you don't have a *nix system I'd suggest installing Cygwin and
using dd in that environment. -- Ian