I have a IBM 340 mb microdrive in my Canon Power-Shot G1 camera. I used all available space on drive and was able to review all pictures. However, when subsequently reviewing the pictures all data was gone (camera indicates 0 kb used). I have not used drive in hope of being able to retreive lost data. Any assistance would be appreciated.

-- george fawcett (fawcett@leber-rubes.com), August 20, 2001

Answers

I would recommend that you call up a data recovery service if the pictures are important. Try seeing what you get from a CF reader as well. It sounds like you might have accidentally hit "format card" somewhere...

-- Isaac Sibson (isibson@hotmail.com), August 21, 2001.

George,

I have the big brother to this drive (the 1 GB). You say that the G1 is reporting 0 Kb used. Have you looked at the microdrive via a PC? I assume that your Microdrive came with a PC Card adapter just as mine did. Are you not using a PC to manage and store your images? As long as you don't do any actions that cause information to be written (including creating new folders, optimizing the drive, adding files) to the Microdrive you will be fine.

What I'm suggesting is that perhaps your G1 interface with the Microdrive is out of sync, but the images still exist. If you find folders &/or files on the drive, move or copy them over to the PC's hard drive. You could then reformat the Microdrive and put it back into the G1.

If the worst has happened, and the files on the Microdrive have been deleted by the G1 or your PC -- all is not lost. What generally happens is that the directory information is deleted, but the files actually remain until written over by other files. You may be able to recover some or all of them using a program like Norton Disk Doctor, which can search for erased files and "unerase" them. The program may ask for help in determining the file extension to assign the recovered files (jpg, tiff, raw, etc.) -- don't worry if you get it wrong, you can simply rename the file extension later.

Baring that, you'd have to do what Isaac suggests and go with a professional data recovery outfit.

Good luck, and do let us know what transpires!

PS Isaac, I hope you had a good flight! :-)

-- Hung James Wasson (HJWasson@aol.com), August 22, 2001.