At 12:00 -0600 11/17/11, David R. wrote: Questions that prompted some more research. Disk Utility (see below) thinks MS-DOS File System (FAT16). (Thanks also to Liam and Ian, both also suggesting the same thing.) My normal process was to read the card using a SmartMedia to PCMCIA adapter on a PowerBook G4. Stage 1 of the disaster happened when I got impatient as OS X.4's driver was re-writing the directory, and manually ejected the PCMCIA adapter. At that point, the SmartMedia became un-mountable either on the camera or on the Mac/adapter. Stage 2 happened when I asked the camera to use its little hammer-icon process on the card, hoping that would allow me to edit - no such luck. It reformatted. I did make a .dmg clone of the SmartMedia after re-formatting it, using a freeware called "Exif Untrasher". There are some odd things about that (like, parts of very very old images still left on the card, and images that I'm surprised were ever on that card). Also, the 128MB card was mostly full, but the Exif-U .dmg is only 62.5 MB. I'm thinking maybe I copied the wrong card? Just now, I repeated that process and came up with a 125 MB file (more what I expected). I also made a copy using DiskUtility, also 125 MB. What's the correct incantation for a dd command under OS X.4 Tiger? The naive dd if=/Volumes/Untitled/ of=clone128M.bin conv=noerror gets only 8k bytes. On the resulting files, Exif Untrasher finds nothing. That makes some sense, as examining the files (both the Exif-U generated and the Disk Utility generated) shows mostly 00's, with the occasional block of FF, and a few random things at the start like "DOS FAT 16" and "this resource fork intentionally left blank" (probably written when I put the card into my OS9 Powerbook 3400's PC slot). I think the camera's format was a real "format" format, ie rewrote all the flash memory to 0. I'm hoping for something that will read residual charge left in the flash even after a format/reset ... and hoping the bill for that isn't something that only a three-letter agency would be interested in. -- - Mark 210-379-4635 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Large Asteroids headed toward planets inhabited by beings that don't have technology adequate to stop them: Think of it as Evolution in Fast-Forward.