On the last day of a trip in China, I began taking photos with my one month old Olympus C-5500 camera using an Olympus 1 GB card. After taking 5 pictures I pressed the quick view button to see the photos and I noticed that they were labelled number 1 - 5. I had over 300 photos on the card and I found that I could not access them. I did not format the card or delete all of the photos (at least not intentionally). The reason that I did not notice the problem while taking pictures is that the correct number of remaining photos available was displayed. I stopped taking new pictures to avoid causing more problems with the card. When I arrived home I connected the camera to my computer and looked at the card in Windows Explorer. I copied the 5 photos to my hard drive. The card is recognized as a 1 GB drive, but the card shows up as a drive that is mostly full. This leads me to believe that the photos are still there and that my chances of recovering them are fairly good (although I have read that Olympus cards can be hard to recover from).
I am going to buy a card reader to avoid the camera causing problems with recovery, but I am interested in whether others have had this specific problem and if so, if any specific software was found to be successful at recovering the files. I thought that something as simple as an undelete function may work, but I would prefer to use a utility that may display the images so that I have some confidence before I make a change to the card, that I am not making the problem worse.
Aug 19, 2005, 5:29 AM
