Help! Recovering JPEGs and Videos (tricky situation)

[infernojericho]

Hi Fellas,

I've got into quite a bit of a complicated situation, and I'm completely stuck on what to do. Here it goes.

I got myself a 32GB MicroSD Card for a trip, and I took a few photos on day 1, not too much, perhaps around 100-200MB in size altogether; everything went well. I was able to download the photos and videos to my laptop, and could view them successfully.

- So I used the very same card on day 2. This is when the nightmare begins.
I started off the day by taking some very long videos, several gigabytes in size.
Then I snapped quite a number of photos, I would say several hundred MBs combined.

I attempted to review the stuff that I took on my camera, however most of them were given an error message. Only the few photos that I took initially in the morning were fine. The majority of the photos that I took later were completely unreadable (Probably around 2 out of 150 photos that I took were previewable) None of the videos were playable.

So I took out the card, and moved the files to my laptop. The files downloaded just fine, however, the ones that were unable to be previewed on the camera can't be viewed on my laptop either. None of the videos worked.

Worse, I have moved the files to my laptop, so the MicroSD card is being shown as empty. I have not written anything on the MicroSD Card, so data should be the way it was earlier.

However, my hunch is the "32Gb" MicroSD card I have is a fake, there is probably no 32GB of space on it to begin with, and by taking the very large videos in the beginning the day I have used up the card's "native and true capacity," and the fake card may have misled data recorded afterwards to be overwritten into the videos.

I have tried using rescue software, but they could only do the basic rescue like accidental deletion; they can't recover the integrity of the JPEG files.

I was thinking of saving the entire RAW image of the MicroSD Card, then attempting to recover it by analyzing the contents of the RAW image file. Is this even possible? can the contents of JPEG and Videos be recovered by reading partial jpeg contents in a large file? If so which software could manage this?

Thanks for reading this long post; any feedback is greatly appreciated!!!

 

[leonfeldman89]

Hi Fellas,

I've got into quite a bit of a complicated situation, and I'm completely stuck on what to do. Here it goes.

I got myself a 32GB MicroSD Card for a trip, and I took a few photos on day 1, not too much, perhaps around 100-200MB in size altogether; everything went well. I was able to download the photos and videos to my laptop, and could view them successfully.

- So I used the very same card on day 2. This is when the nightmare begins.
I started off the day by taking some very long videos, several gigabytes in size.
Then I snapped quite a number of photos, I would say several hundred MBs combined.

I attempted to review the stuff that I took on my camera, however most of them were given an error message. Only the few photos that I took initially in the morning were fine. The majority of the photos that I took later were completely unreadable (Probably around 2 out of 150 photos that I took were previewable) None of the videos were playable.

So I took out the card, and moved the files to my laptop. The files downloaded just fine, however, the ones that were unable to be previewed on the camera can't be viewed on my laptop either. None of the videos worked.

Worse, I have moved the files to my laptop, so the MicroSD card is being shown as empty. I have not written anything on the MicroSD Card, so data should be the way it was earlier.

However, my hunch is the "32Gb" MicroSD card I have is a fake, there is probably no 32GB of space on it to begin with, and by taking the very large videos in the beginning the day I have used up the card's "native and true capacity," and the fake card may have misled data recorded afterwards to be overwritten into the videos.

I have tried using rescue software, but they could only do the basic rescue like accidental deletion; they can't recover the integrity of the JPEG files.

I was thinking of saving the entire RAW image of the MicroSD Card, then attempting to recover it by analyzing the contents of the RAW image file. Is this even possible? can the contents of JPEG and Videos be recovered by reading partial jpeg contents in a large file? If so which software could manage this?

Thanks for reading this long post; any feedback is greatly appreciated!!!

There's commercial jpeg reconstruction software, with movies it requires manual reconstruction if it's even possible depending on the format and severity of corruption.

I can say that the scenario you described with a "fake card" just doesn't happen ever, but overwritten data is pretty common with flash media in cameras.

Best thing you can do is go to a proffesional to get a free diagnostic and find out if your data is still recoverable.