[olug] Linux utilities to unformat / unerase / scavange digital

[Daniel Linder]

On Mon, December 31, 2007 00:16, Obi-Wan wrote:
>> My dads Olympus digital camera decided to reformat the flash card right
>> *AFTER* taking all the Christmas photos.  :-(
>> Anyone else have any other suggestions?
>
> My SanDisk Extreme III CF cards came with a mini CD that contained a
> rescue utility called "RescuePRO" that I've used at least once with
> success.  It only runs on Windows, but if it'll do you some good,
> I'll put an ISO on my web site.

After playing with it for another hour yesterday, I've learned something:
Olympus must implement a true "format" when that option is used on their
cameras.  :-) :-(

He had the 32MB flash that he got with the camera, so I ran "photorec"
(from the "testdisk" package under Ubuntu).  It worked very well and found
25+ photos on this test media that had been _erased_.  When we re-ran the
utility on the media after we had the camera format the flash card, it
didn't get back anything.  A quick check of the contents of the raw space
(gathered using "dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/tmp/media.dd") shows a lot of
semi-random garbage but nothing with the hex "FF D8 FF E0" or "FF D8 FF
E1" headers.

Thankfully this is the first time the camera ever accidentally formatted
the card, so we'll just have to assume it was just a bad set of accidental
button pushes...

Thanks for all the pointers!  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Dan

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