A week or so ago I took nearly an entire 8MB SmartMedia card full of photos at a party with my Toshiba PDR-M1. With one photo left, I was approached by one of my neices(the five year old) and took her picture. Of course, she moved just as I hit the shutter. In the process of explaining that it was no big deal and I could just erase that photo and take another, I accidentally erased ALL not a SINGLE frame! To complicate matters further(it takes practice), I took her picture again before realizing my mistake. I now had a SmartMedia full of erased(?) photos with at least one new one written to the card. After the feelings of utter stupidity passed, I got to thinking that perhaps there was hope, since I had only erased the files and not reformatted the SmartMedia card. Thus, I began my quest for the Holy Grail... Er, wrong sojourn.

I asked a few questions of other users on a Fuji MX700 Forum, and was told that while this didn't work with FlashPath adaptors, one fellow had managed it with his parallel port based SmartMedia reader and a program called RecoverNT ver 2.5. So I purchased a Lexar Media reader and found the shareware trial version of RecoverNT and gave it a shot. Okay, Okay, I wanted a SmartMedia reader anyhow... :)

So far, the results(if you're still reading this 20 volume encyclopedia...) are:

Delkin 8MB SmartMedia card: Files saved to the card by the camera CAN be read by the reader. After files are read by the reader they CAN'T be accessed by the camera. Files CAN'T be written back to the card and accessed by the camera. Erased files CAN'T be recovered.

Toshiba 4MB SmartMedia card: Files saved to the card by the camera CAN be read by the reader. After files are read by the reader they CAN be accessed by the camera. Files CAN be written back to the card and accessed by the camera. Erased files CAN'T be recovered.

My conclusion is that it's likely that Delkin cards may not be quite perfectly compatible with the PDR-M1. However, whether this is Toshiba's fault or Delkin's remains a complete mystery to me. Don't get me wrong, the Delkin cards work fine in the camera and you'd never know they weren't perfectly compatible if you were transferring files with the camera connected to your serial port. But, it is odd that they act so strangely with the Lexar Media Reader.

The other strange thing is that I can't seem to recover deleted files from the Toshiba card either. I'm wondering if the PDR-M1 does some odd things to the files when it deletes them rather than just destroying the link to the files in the SmartMedia's directory.

I've sent a couple of emails to Toshiba and to Lexar Media to see what their respective tech support departments make of all of this. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get a response, if at all. I suppose I'll have to add Delkin to my Email list too. Sigh...

In light of all the above, I'd like to know if any of you have had any success recovering deleted files from SmartMedia. If so, what brand/model camera, what brand SmartMedia, and what reader did you use? And Thanks for wading through this 21 volume edition of the Starr Report... :)

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), December 16, 1998

Answers

Yes, same thing happened to me... but with a CF card... I accidently deleted all the images on my Nikon 950 /w a Lexar 48mb 4x (USB enabled) card. I prayed and stuck it in the USB Lexar reader (which makes it look like a drive), ran norton utilities on it, and thankfully recovered all the files! I was amazed to say the least!

-- Ian McCloy (rudiedude@yahoo.com), September 02, 2001.