Recently one of my CF-cards suddenly lost all images and movies from my Canon 5D MarkII. When inserting it in the camera it just said “no images” and when inserting it in my computer it displayed huge amounts of strange files with strange names.
A quick question on twitter ended with these recommendations:
DataRescue (Mac)
Camera Salvage (Mac)
Digital Photo Recovery (Windows, free)
Smart Recovery (Windows, free)
Photo Rescue (Mac and Windows)
Thanks to @moltke, @willytk, @rudolfsen, @magnusak, @mortend, @evensr. Now go follow them. They’re helpful people.
But before booting to Windows or buying one of the Mac apps I wanted to try a small free program called PhotoRec (Mac, Win, Linux). By the way also recommended by @willytk.
And it did the trick. People might be scared of the command line, but it was fairly simple to choose the card, select FAT as the file system, choose a location to store the rescued files and start the operation.
One of the images with some corruption.
PhotoRec is currently ticking away. And it seems to find all the files on the card. Both images and movies. Two of the images have some errors on them, but I can live with that. 8 gigs of movies and RAW images rescued…
So now you know. In case you experience something similar.
eirikso 
Smart Recovery for PC is also free, and even though the web page don’t have the best layout, the actual program is very easy to use. Here
Ok, thank you. I’ve updated the post.
This post is about 2 weeks late.. had some problems with a CF card that I first used in my canon, then in my hasselblad.. turns out thats a no-no!
Really hard to find FREE rescue software.. ended up having to borrow a friends SanDisk software that comes with the cards.. :=)
Guess this is the kind of stuff you don’t start investigating before you really need to… 🙂
Great post, but I had no luck with these products. Does anyone know how to fix corrupted JPEGs that are off of the CF card – and are now on a hard drive?
My mac actually reads the corrupted files, but I haven’t found a way to fix them. Don’t know if there’s any software that can reconstruct images like this: https://eirikso.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/imagewitherror.jpg
I just figured that “this image is not possible to fix”…
I’m worried that’s the case with my images, too, but I have thousands of them that were corrupted on the card that I desperately need back. No software out there seems to offer a solution.
Good to see it worked out! I haven’t tried PhotoRec, but RescuePro DeLuxe came free with one of my Sandisk Extreme MCMLXXXIX (or was it IV?) cards and has saved me two times. It’s costs money, but might be worth a try if there are no free solutions that work.
If you have problems with your memory card in 80% of all cases the controller of your card is damaged and no software or card reader can help. You must separate the memory chip and dump the raw data to recover your data, look here: CF xD SD MMC memory card/stick photo recovery
I recently shot a bunch of pics and filled up the CF card. When I got home and tried to copy them to my Mac there were about 10 that wouldn’t copy (or even be read). I’m told this happens sometimes when you slam fill up a CF card (i.e. the camera says “CF Card Full”). The card seems okay and the partition seems intact but there’s just a few pics that are completely or almost completely gray. My Windows PC reads them okay so I have a back-up but still no idea how to fix the JPG files themselves… Does that software exist?
I’m afraid I don’t know any software that would fix corrupted JPG-files. If anyone knows, please leave a comment… 🙂
please try this cf card recovery program from http://www.cfcardrecovery.com , it is easy to use
Today died my secong 16Gb card 😦
Will try progz you describe here. But … still nobody even detects card in a reader 😦
terrific bro! the command line program works like a charm
I recently lost all photos from a holiday trip to Lanzarote and was devastated. I tried all the recovery software I could get my hands on, but nothing would work. Apparently, as the card manufacturer told me after I asked them for advice, this was because the cards’ controller was fried, and the recovery software couldn’t even get to the data. They pointed me to Recoverfab (http://card-recovery.biz/), a small company that works with physically damaged media, and only charges for actually recovered data, and I could not be happier: 2500 pictures saved from doom.
Nothing but awesome! Took all of 15 minutes and got all my pics recovered!!!
Thank you so much!! Just used this program to recover 300 photos I recently took at a wedding and thought I had lost. Wonderful!
Same thing happened to me, but I could still view my photos on the camera. Dumping to the computer directly from the camera worked.
[…] https://eirikso.com/2009/03/23/how-to-rescue-images-from-a-corrupted-cf-card/ […]
The memory card used is does not meet the standard requirement of the DSLR, e.g. (the required SDCard should be class 6, but the installed is of lower class). This can be a critical factor that’s why it is wise to check the requirement first before buying. Not all memory cards are the same.
I had not used PhotoRec software but I try out Stellar Repair for Photos software which repairs corrupted image files and repair corrupt raw camera files. It’s work useful for me.Thanks!