Part of the 365 Days project.
Geocache “Cassie’s Bell Series 4 of 9″ (GC1ZRME). Picked up my Dodge Challenger TB that has just got second place in my TB grand prix.
February, 2011:
2011 February 25
Part of the 365 Days project.
I suppose it was too much to ask for more than one mild spring day. Back to the rain …
2011 February 24
Part of the 365 Days project.
Cat: Is that what I think it is?
Lister: What d’you think it is?
Cat: An orange whirly thing in space!
Holly: There’s some sort of disruption to the time-fabric continuum. At least, I presume that’s what it is, it’s certainly got all the signs. There’s this big wibbly-wobbly swirly thing that’s headed straight towards us.
Cat: I hate to get all technical on you, but all hands on deck! Swirly thing alert!
Recovering lost photos from a memory card using Linux
Occasionally my camera has messed up the memory card and lots of photos have been lost. Of course, the photos are not really lost it’s just the file system that is corrupt. With the right software, it’s possible to search the contents of the card and retrieve the lost or deleted files.
I use Linux, and as with most things, there are free open-source applications that do exactly what you want. If you are ever in this situation, here is what you need to do.
- As soon as you know there is a problem – take the memory card out of the camera! If you do not do this you run the risk of overwriting the lost photos, and then they will be lost forever.
- Install the application “photorec” which is part of the “testdisk” package. Under Fedora Linux this is very easy to do since it is included in the Fedora repository. As root run the command
# yum install testdisk
- Now, using a card reader make an image of the contents of the card. This can be done easily using “dd” which is included by default with most Linux distributions. Assuming that your card reader shows up as “/dev/sdb” and the photos are on the first partition, use
$ dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=card.img bs=1024
You will need to check this is correct for your particular system.
- Finally, give the card image to photorec
$ photorec card.img
and follow the prompts. Tell it the type of partition – this will almost certainly be FAT or FAT32. Photorec will then search through the image and recover any media files it finds – which will hopefully be all of your photos!
This has certainly saved me a lot of frustration in the past!
