PC wants to format my XD card?!?!

[flynryn]

I'm trying to extract the 400 plus pictures from my M1GB XD card. Initially, when i loaded the card into the card reader, VISTA immediately opened the file to view the pictures. However, I could only see the thumbnails for about half of them.

I tried to copy all of the pictures from the card to my PC hard drive. I was able to copy them all, but could only view 1/2 of the pictures. It seemed that the PC only wanted to read the 1st 200, and decided that it didn't recognize the remaining 200+.

So, I burned the 1st half of the pictures onto a CD (to make sure I didn't loose what I had). Then, I removed the ones I put on CD from the memory card - leaving only the 200+ that I couldn't open.

I then pulled the memory card out, put it back into the reader. When I did so, VISTA did not attempt to automatically open for viewing. I accessed My Computer, and tried to manually open the drive associated with my card reader. I got a message saying, "You need to format the disk in drive I: before you can use it. Do you want to format it?"

At this point, I got nervous. I found ZAR on the web, and installed it. I ran the ZAR tool on my memory card, and it said that it located 500+ pictures after 1.5 hrs. I saved those pictures to my hard drive, and upon viewing them - I see the pictures that were in the 1st half, and had already burned to CD. In fact, there were doubles of the first 200 pictures.

What in the world is going on???? I am at a loss as to how to recover my 2nd half of pictures. Anyone have an idea???


By the way, I was able to see all 400+ pictures on my camera while the memory stick was in it. This was before the fiasco listed above.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

There is little we can do if you have already run ZAR and it completed the run without error.
The only thing I can suggest is that you try the simple volume recovery mode (the same procedure as for formatted volume)

Refer here for a step-by-step description.
However, there may be a slight difference between the processing of a volume on a hard disk versus the memory card.
Take note: depending on the specific configuration, you may encounter the following situations during Step 4, selecting a volume.

• There may be no prompt at all. Scan may start immediately after you select your card reader. This is normal.
• The list of volumes may be empty or erratic. Regardless of the contents of the list, right click it, select "Define volume manually". When prompted, select "There was only one volume, scan the entire disk", click OK. An additional entry will appear in the list, with the "Origin" listed as "User input". Select it and click "Next".

Additional note: Although ZAR will emit the warning that the eval version only works with 4 folders per run, the attempt can be completed with the eval version. Considering there is typically just two or three folders on the camera card, this should be well within the 4 folder limit.