Recently, a friend of mine ended up having his camera SD card corrupted after he mistakenly unplugged it while transfering the files. That is until he plugged it back in and he got the dreaded Windows Prompt that goes something along the lines of “* Drive is corrupt or unformatted. Do you want to format this drive?” The SD card showed up as a drive but he could not longer access the month of pictures that he had on it.
He asked me what to do and I googled for it. Then did I stumble upon this software called Zero Assumption Recovery. It is a free software that will recover images and movies from corrupted SD or Micro SD card (there is a paid version for $50 dollars which allows you to recover any files). This software can also recover images and movies that you have already deleted(!). The recovery process will be a bit lengthy but it worked like a charm for my friend.
The steps to be done are simple.
- Download the free image recovery version or the full version as your wish (The free image recovery portion is just part of the trial so you will be downloading the free trial and the image recovery will stay free after the trial expires).
- Install and run the ZAR trial.
- Insert the memory card into the reader device.
- On the first screen, no adjustment is required, just hit “Next»”.
- Program will then prompt you for an operation mode. Select_“Recover images from camera memory card”, then hit“Next»”_.
- Select your memory card from the list of the attached devices. You can identify the memory card by its media size or by the model name (if available).
- The rest is mostly automatic. When the analysis is done, select files to recover, specify the directory to place recovered files to, hit_“Start copying”_and you’re done.
You can also follow this link for tutorial.
The tutorial above describes the procedure used to recover photos stored on the digital camera memory card if
- the images were deleted before copying to the PC
- the card was accidentally formatted
- some camera failure occured and the images are not accessible any longer
Current version (ZAR 9.2) supports digital photo recovery for the following file formats:
- GIF
- JPEG
- TIFF
- CRW (Canon RAW data)
- MOV
- AVI movie
- WAV
- CR2 (Canon CR2 RAW format)
- ORF (Olympus RAW format)
- and most of the digital camera models.
This software was successful for most of the people but for some people, few photos were missing among the recovered ones. In case, if it didn’t work for you, tell me about it in the comments section and I will try to give you a better solution.