Today I went out to Lynmouth for a walk, taking my camera. Unfortunately all my batteries were nearly flat, and one set ran out of power while writing an image to the SmartMedia card, corrupting it.
When I got back I started looking for data recovery tools. I found the following:
* “Davory”:http://www.x-ways.net/davory/index-m.html
* “MediaRECOVER”:http://www.mediarecover.com/
Davory didn’t work on the card but MediaRECOVER did, which gave me hope. But I wasn’t going to pay $30 if I could help it 
10 minutes surfing turned up the following two FREE tools:
* “Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery”:http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital_image_recovery.htm
* “Jpegdump”:http://www.goto.onlinehome.de/dsc/jpegdump.htm
Again, ZADIR didn’t work (why I’ve no idea, as it definitely was analysing the card) but Jpegdump did it! So I now have back all my photos… cool!
Highly recommended tool to keep to hand - and a big thank you to their authors for releasing them free of charge.
2 comments ↓
I had accidentally deleted half of the pictures on my SmartCard and none of the programs listed worked for me. Either they couldn’t work on windows ME (Zero), cost too much (Davory, MediaRECOVER) or just didn’t work at all (Jpegdump). However I found this nice program at Art-Plus that worked like a charm, not only did it recover my deleted pictures but it also recovered some old pictures I had erased from the card long ago. It works on all Windows versions from 95 to XP. See:
http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/downloads.htm
click on Digital Photo Recovery: photorec.exe (1.2Mb) to download for free.
Thanks Henri, I’ll try that one in future! The above free tools haven’t always worked for me since I posted this, so I’m looking forward to trying it.
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