16 GB memory cards – a cautionary tale (1 Viewer)

Before travelling to Budapest on holiday recently , I purchased a couple of 16GB Kingston elite pro memory cards for my Canon 7D. I wanted to me sure I had enough space for the large 7D Raw files.

In the beginning I used a 16GB SanDisk Ultra card and when that was filled I switched to a 16GB Kingston elite pro memory card. The weather deteriorated somewhat after the first week so thankfully the majority of images were on the SanDisk card. I realised from the beginning that the Kingston card wasn’t working optimally as a number of images, especially when shooting in bursts, couldn’t be viewed in the camera and had to be deleted. At this point I should have switched to the 8GB or the 4GB card that I also had with me but I wanted to save them for my wife who shoots in JPEG format. In the event this proved unnecessary as she didn’t fill the card in her camera.

When I got home I discovered that I had a serious problem. Many of the files turned out to be corrupt and the ones that weren’t, while they looked fine in the thumbnails and in the Quick check tool in DPP, looked very odd indeed when I opened the RAW file (see attached image 1).

The first thing I did was to use SanDisk’s RescuePRO to recover the images on the card but that just allowed more of the files to be opened in DPP. They still looked very strange. Then I downloaded the demo version of a program called PixRecovery that was supposed to repair corrupted files but although the programme claimed the files had been repaired they still looked the same. I think the problem may have been that the files weren’t seen by the programme to be corrupted.

Finally I found a partial solution by downloading a trial version of Breeze Browser Pro and using it to extract the embedded JPEG images from the RAW files. This worked very well (see attached image 2). The files have the same resolution as the RAW files though I imagine they are somewhat compressed as they are about 2 MB in size.

Ironically fixing the problem with the cards turned out to be very simple. All I had to do was update the firmware in the 7D. All my cards now work perfectly and seem to write the files to the card much faster than before. I have never bothered to update firmware previously but I would not hesitate to do so again. The whole process took about 10 minutes including finding and viewing an instruction film in You Tube.

I’m starting this thread for two reasons:
1 – To help others faced with a similar problem.
2 – To find out if I could have done more to recover/repair the actual Raw images instead of just extracting the JPEG files. Any suggestions?

Recovery Pro is rubbish, Pandora recovery is 100x better download free.

http://www.cnet.com/1770-5_1-0.html?query=pandora+recovery&tag=srch

Can I also suggest that before using a card in a DIFFERENT camera you low level format it.

DO NOT swap bards between cameras, when a card or a hard drive are formatted a file information block is written containing info about what is on the card, when you delete/format the card in the original camera it retains this FIB which is why deleted files can be recovererd by say, panda.

This FIB is written by your camera, therefore when used in another camera it will work but can be corrupted hence fraults.

These days you could buy a card that someone else has used, say from "Ebay and new" but returned under the distance selling regs, It will have been used in another camera!

ALWAYS format a card when received, my canon allows a low level format which delets EVERYTHING if others cameras do not have this low level format it very simply in windows.

I have Canon, my son Nikon, our cards are VERY well marked with black pen.

Thanks for the tip on Pandora recovery, JSER! I'll definitely give that a try.
I never swap cards between cameras without formatting them, though usually it's just a quick format. But after reading your tip I think I'll avoid swapping them at all. Very interesting info about FIBs.
I never buy cards from e-Bay.
I've never had any problems recovering deleted files but these corrupted RAW files threw me a bit.

Macswede said:

Thanks for the tip on Pandora recovery, JSER! I'll definitely give that a try.
I never swap cards between cameras without formatting them, though usually it's just a quick format. But after reading your tip I think I'll avoid swapping them at all. Very interesting info about FIBs.
I never buy cards from e-Bay.
I've never had any problems recovering deleted files but these corrupted RAW files threw me a bit.

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