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Photos hidden on my CompactFlash drive

A

aarondl

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 6, 2010
6
0
I have an old Nikon D70s, using SanDisk Ultra II 4Gb compact flash drives. Twice now, I've taken a number of pictures, say 30, then something goes awry and the camera tells me there is nothing on the drive. Sure enough, I plug it into my computer, and no images show up, yet there is 120mb of space taken, so the images are in there somewhere.

Any ideas on how to retrieve the images? Thanks in advance for ideas!

BTW, this has now happened on two drives. Hmm. Accepting donations for a new Nikon D90....
 
maybe your CF is toast. how are you trying to import the photos?
 
Usually I bring it up on my desktop, viewing it in the folder. I like to title my photos before I upload them into iPhoto, so usually I manually copy them into a desktop folder.

I've just discovered a third drive that seems to have a ton of photos on it that can't be seen. It's a 4gb drive that has 5 photos viewable, and when in the camera, can only hold 11 more. So about 3.9gb are hidden.
 
same story. I plugged in the noted drive, and only five photos showed up with Image Capture.
 
what drive? leave the cf in the camera and attach the camera via usb.
 
Hmm. Doesn't seem to make a difference. In Image Capture, the same five images show up. On the desktop, it says that there is only 69.3mb available, though it is a 4gb drive with five images on it. On this drive, there is garbage on it, such as "_~1.TrA" and "TRASHE~1. ␀", though they are 0kb in size.

Any way to see hidden files on the drive?
 
no, I can't see the photos at all. There is no way to tell that they are there other than the fact that they are still using up space on the CF drive.
 
again, sounds like the files on the CF are corrupted or the CF itself is toast. wish i could offer more help.
 
Thanks for your suggestions. I would agree with you about the CF, only I have three drives that are having the same problem, so I have a sinking suspicion that it may be my beloved D70s. Course, I've never updated the software on it since I bought it...in 2005. Maybe it's time to cough up $150 and get it done.
 
Inexpensive solution:

Buy a copy of PhotoRescue ($29) - it doesn't cost much, and it'll get anything off those CF drives if it's there.

Buy a spray can of contact cleaner - from any electronics shop - and spray it into the card slot on your D70 to clean dirt off the pins. Before you do this, take the camera battery out. Squirting this stuff into your camera seems to be quite safe - I was slightly too enthusiastic when I did this to my D70 and it started to drip out of the front of the camera (!) but it evaporates very quickly and didn't do any harm.

Reformat your CF drives.

- HB
 
Just to add, my experience was this - after about 7 years of use my D70 started to not recognise CF cards. It would also suddenly decide a card (with lots of photos on) was unusable and would make the photos on that card invisible. This happened with all my CF cards and reformatting the cards didn't help. Then, probably about a year and a half ago I fixed it by cleaning the CF card pins inside the camera (as described above) and I managed to retrieve my photos with PhotoRescue. No problems since then, so it seems to have worked.

- HB
 
i have a D200 and had an experience with a bad pin. fortunately, it didn't corrupt anything, it just stopped reading the cards.
 
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