Hi,

I accidently formated the CF (32MB that comes default with canon S45 digital camera). the format was done through the menu of the camera. it seems that the process took only about 2 seconds (there were only 7 photos on that CF). After the format I immediatly took the CF out of the camera, and havn´t used it since then. Is a recovery of the photos possible? Can you recommend software or services that can do it. I´m on vacation now (on a trip) and your answer is very important to me.

thanks in advance, motti.

-- Motti Sorek (mottiso@msn.com), January 19, 2003

Answers

It may be possible with a card reader connected to a PC. There are some tools which may allow recovery of the photos if you've not written any more to the card. It somewhat depends on how the camera formats the card. The greatest chance of success is if you have done no deletes of images either since you formatted the card the time before this "oops" formatting.

This package was previously freeware, and has now gone commercial: http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/dir/

This is a commercial product, you can download a demo which will probably let you tell what can be recovered: http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

In either case you will need access to a USB card reader, or perhaps a PCMCIA reader for your CF card.

-- Gary Berg (photo@BunkeBerg.com), January 20, 2003.