Be Excellent To Each Other

Aww man, I think my SD card's buggered.

So, I have (had) these photos on it I was going to transfer to my Mac. The photos seemed A-OK earlier when I was viewing them on my camera. Put the SD card in the USB card reader, and iPhoto springs into action, but the SD card doesn't appear on the desktop. So I 'unmount' the SD card as far as I can, restart the Mac and use my girlfriend's card reader, which is nicer and more modern. The SD card appears on the desktop, but it's all screwed up. A quarter of the picture files are now "Zero KB(!)", and the rest are read as being several hundred kilobytes, when they should be several megabytes large considering the camera's megapixel ability. The photos are all greyed out when viewed through Preview, so they're presumably corrupted files.

Was it a duff SD card, or reader(s), do you think? Do I need to bin either of them, or would reformatting the SD make it work properly, although at the expense of losing my photos?

The card's branding is "SanDisk Ultra II" and the capacity is (was?) 2Gb, if that is relevant information.

Have you tried viewing them on the camera again?

That sounds worryingly like the camera was writing to it when you removed it. No suggestions, but I hope you get it all back.

Yes. It says "THUMBNAIL IS DISPLAYED" for all images, which then as you'd imagine appear all fuzzy and de-resolutioned on the camera screen. I've also plugged my girlfriend's nice card reader and the SD card into her MacBook and the pictures appear as fucked as ever.

(Oddly, the thumbnail images, which become the icon images in the Leopard incarnations of Mac OS X, are all present and correct but the actual photo JPGs are corrupt, displaying all in grey apart from a strip on the side.)


Shit, possibly, unless it was the iMac and/or dodgy card reader. No way of proving the former at this point in time though.

SD cards suck Always* failing.

*sometimes

Mmm, I was hoping the camera would be able to read it when anything else couldn't, and you could use the camera to download the pictures.
This happened once or twice with my camera, but it sounds like it's not an option for you.

Ah, good point about the camera download. Yes, seems like it's too far gone for that option. I just used the Disk Utility.app on the card, and it says...

Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

Have you tried any software for recovering the images yet? I think this is one I've used in the past.

Haven't as yet, no. And that one's admittedly no use as i don't own a WinPC. Thanks for mentioning the idea of restoration software though. I'll see what I can do. At least I can console myself that the photos weren't for any essential professional purposes.

(Bah, I remembered that the newest iMacs have an SD card slot inside the case. That'd be a good remedy against rubbish card readers.)

What Devilman said. You're suffering from some sort of card corruption, probably from software problems rather than hardware. You need to run a recovery tool over it to rescue what you can, and then throw it away because you can never trust it again. There's loads of these tools and they are all about as good as each other.

(I once rescued MyFinger's sisters graduation pics from a corrupted card using a tool I wrote myself!)

Also: slide the write protect tab on the card over right now, because you don't want any software writing to the card and making the corruption worse.

Though I'd resurrectify the thread as I've had further problems with SD cards.

Seemingly, another SD card used in the same camera (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS85) also got itself corrupted. Or rather, the images on it did.

So, I take a set of photos, let's call them Batch 1. I take them with the camera and a different SD card to my original card inside. Take photos, connect camera to my Mac via a USB cable, photos get transferred to iPhoto, no problem, the image files transfer intact. Now, onto Batch 2, which I took today during a microlight trip. I took the photos as per usual, but when transferring them to my Mac later, as the camera's battery was nearly empty, I took the SD card out of the camera and use my girlfriend's card reader. Unfortunately, not only were a third of the photo files corrupt (which were seemingly OK when previewed on the camera), but loads of the photos from Batch 1 which still existed on the card were now corrupted files/images too, when previously they were fine and transferred to my Mac properly.

Not sure what could be wrong here, as the card reader my girlfriend owns has always been 100% reliable with SD cards, and last time I had corruption issues it was my crappier, ancient card reader that seemed to trigger the problem. Could it be a fault inside my camera?

Two things.

Firstly I have had to become rather intimate with SD cards recently. I've been shooting with the EX1 using adaptors onto SD cards which is a strictly unofficial solution. Only very specific cards work and all cards are not born equal by any means.

Secondly many readers can be crap and you also need to ensure the computer has finished with the card before ejecting. The cards are dead easy to corrupt.

One of the best SD cards on the market at the moment is the ATP Pro Max. They are bloody hard to get hold of in this country (and expensive) so I've imported mine from the USA. Exceptionally consistent and a step above the usual cost reduced consumer tripe. I have 5 or 6 of them which have replaced Transcend cards that claim to be of equal performance but actually are pig slow and caused problems for me. I get mine from here:

http://mxmexpress.com/?page_id=9

I also use the adaptors on that page in the camera and into the expresscard slot on the Mac. I also borrow one of the adaptors from the camera bag if I want to transfer stuff from the stills camera in. An expresscard reader feels far more robust than some flimsy USB dongle.

NB: The ATP cards might be massive overkill for general point and shoot stills work but if you value your images they are worth considering. It's not just the speed (in fact they aren't even the fastest) but that ATP seem to operate far higher levels of QC than some other companies. Mine get a real hammering (35 meg a second for an hour at a time) and operate with plenty of headroom.

Thanks for the RMDs Chinny, but those seem a bit out of my price range, at least currently. I'm no professional camera-ist person, but I do like to keep my photos intact, so it's rather annoying to say the least. In the meantime, I've given my camera over to my dad, who is an electronics expert, just in case there's bad contacts in the camera somewhere, which would be within his expertise to fix (hopefully).

Try some of the higher end Sandisk cards if ATP are out of your range. But avoid cheap cards. As many EX1 users have found out, even so called "quality" brands such as Transcend can be very inconsistent.