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In a situation involving inaccessible photos on the flash drive, the first step might be to open the disk manually on your PC to see if you can navigate your way through the folders. Find the disk drive, which will be labeled as a "Removable Disk" with a drive designation like E:, and open it up. If you can see a folder, open it. Keep opening folders until, hopefully, you locate the one containing your photos. You can then use View -> Thumbnails to examine preview-sized versions of the images, and copy the files to your PC hard disk as necessary. If you find you can't navigate the folders (maybe the PC also claims the drive isn't formatted), your next step should involve the use of disk recovery software. If the files are there, good software can probably reconstruct the folder tree and rebuild the file access table. As with electronic mail data, software is available to recover unreadable or deleted photos from both types of media; one such software is package is Data Recovery from ParetoLogic. You can download it here. Once some or all files have been recovered, you should immediately copy everything from the flash drive to a folder on your PC disk for safekeeping. I'd then recommend using the camera (not the PC) to reformat the flash drive. Each camera usually has its own formatting style and folder hierarchy, so it's safer to let it handle the chore of formatting a flash drive. If you find your flash drive is constantly getting confused, you can either try another drive or another method for accessing your photos. If a new flash drive fixes the problem, pitch the old one (or return it if it's under warranty). If you've accidentally deleted files from a flash drive or PC hard disk, they may still be recoverable using the software mentioned above. And remember that if you've accidentally deleted photos from your PC, the files may simply be sitting in the Recycle Bin. Files deleted via the camera's interface will only be recoverable using photo recovery software. Many users seem to think digital media is less reliable than film. This assumption is incorrect. I worked in a camera store and as a photographer for several years, and saw many cases of torn or fogged film as well as jammed cameras. In one case a customer who rented a helicopter for a flight over the Grand Canyon begged me to remove film she said was jammed inside her high end SLR. I opened the camera in a darkroom to find no film inside at all. She'd forgotten to load it, and somehow convinced herself otherwise. You can't do this with a digital camera, and a bad flash drive can simply be swapped out. No darkroom required! |
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