Geodog

Great find. Thanks!

I hope this program works. It read like it will, but I don't be able to try it for a couple of hours.

Thanks for the suggestion!

You have go to be kidding Zero assuption was the worst of the bunch!! Crapola!

Well, Mr. Anonymous, mileage may vary, and everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but it should be noted that you (the person who posted the last opinion) also posted the address of a competing (but not free) product.

Myself, I'd try the free one that worked for me, Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery, first. What's to lose?

This is pretty funny. Zero assumption simply goes out and scans for particular file header. The program simply says hey heres an image takes all that space until it finds another and creates a file and says here is your recovered image. It does not account for fragmentation, does not use the storage FAT if available, does not consider that picture quality may have been changed,therefore resizing the file. To say that this works better than any other is bogus and shows that this whole page is simply an advertisement for ZA. I have tested all of them and there are some including the ones you mentioned that were not as good as ZA above that not only do this kind of scan but also have added built in help for fragmentation. Much better programs by leaps and bounds. Don't get me wrong free is nice, but to say this is the best is so far from the truth it is laughable. So some more home work!! Run these program and watch what they do in a windows pe explorer at runtime. There are some, I am not going to advertise, that are much better than others. Maybe you just did not check there options menu because you really wanted to write an add for ZA? Bottom line this article is not written by any one with real knowledge of programming what the programs do to recover, because the first option for all of them is the same and it is the ONLY option ZA has. ZA is free give it a shot. If you are a digtial photographer add it to your toools but continue your quest.

These adds are what google should filter for. However, put this up knows what Google likes and Google likes forums with lots of relative text. Hopefully, people at the O'Reily group will catch on that forums used to be INFOMATIVE now they are turning into adds! :-(

I followed the path described in the first posting on ZA. I downloaded photorescue and was happy to see my pictures were still there. I was not happy to see I had to pay 29 US dollars to be able to actually recover them but I was willing to do it. Unfortunately, I cannot wait to recover my pictures until I get a box with the ssoftware in the mail (I am not even in the US so that would take just too long). I need them now. I then found this posting on ZA and downloaded it but worked just partially (only 4 out of the 15 pictures I was able to see with photorescue were recovered).

So, I am will keep looking for a good solution. I wish someone had posted alternatives instead of just flaming...

best,

This is the basic routine to rip JPEGs out of a file (for instance a disc image created by the Data Rescue product :-) ). No it doesn't take advantage of the Allocation table but works in most instances - it just got 30 images out of an 'empty' memory card of mine so does work.

I wrote it after the ZA recovery software told me that there were no files on the card :-(

FILE * in = NULL;
FILE * out = NULL;
unsigned int nFnum = 0x0000; // file number to output
unsigned int datasize = 0x0000;

CString fname;

unsigned char buffer[0x10];

buffer[0] = 0x00;
buffer[1] = 0x00;
buffer[2] = 0x00;
buffer[3] = 0x00;
datasize = 0;

// open input file
in = fopen("card_image.cib","rb");

// scan file for JPEG header
while (!feof(in))
{
if ((buffer[0]==0xFF)&&
((buffer[1]==0xD8)&&
((buffer[2]==0xFF)&&
(buffer[3]&0xEE==0xE0))))
{
if ((out!=NULL)&&
(datasize>60000)) // minimum size is about 60K
{
fclose(out);
nFnum++;
datasize = 0;
// jpeg header found so close old file and start again
fname.Format("PICTURE%04d.jpg", nFnum);
out = fopen(fname, "wb");
}
if (out==NULL)
{
// jpeg header found so close old file and start again
fname.Format("PICTURE%04d.jpg", nFnum);
out = fopen(fname, "wb");
}
fwrite(buffer,1,1,out);
// move the bytes down
buffer[0] = buffer[1];
buffer[1] = buffer[2];
buffer[2] = buffer[3];
fread(&buffer[3],1,1,in);
datasize++;

}
else
{
if (out!=NULL)
{
fwrite(buffer,1,1,out);
datasize++;
}
// move the bytes down
buffer[0] = buffer[1];
buffer[1] = buffer[2];
buffer[2] = buffer[3];
fread(&buffer[3],1,1,in);
}
}
if (NULL!=in)
{
fclose(in);
}
if (NULL!=out)
{
fclose(out);
}

Sweet tool! I deleted the whole card (thinking I'd already downloaded pics). Found this posting, installed utility and BAM! Recovered all 52 pictures. Thanks! Fujifilm FinePix A303