Be Excellent To Each Other

Lady T's found a few corrupted files on her Compact Flash card - 98% of the photos are fine but a couple have come out odd, like only part of the picture has been saved. They look OK as thumbnails on the back of the camera though.

Someone once warned us that shooting til the camera shows zero shots remaining is risky (something to do with possibly 'overfilling' the card as the shots remaining is basically an estimate. I don't know if this is true or not but I know Lady T definitely does this. She's also been moving cards between cameras and using them.

I'm doing some quick looking around, but has anyone got any (ideally free) software to recommend that I can run to scan the cards and check if they are physically bad or if (as I suspect) they have just been misused a bit.

Thanks

I'm pretty sure you can just use standard windows tools to test the integrity of them (i.e. chkdsk ?)

Cards are cheap and lost photos are potentially heartbreaking; I'd bin the card and get another at the first hint of trouble, myself.

Never heard of this "don't fill it" advice and that sounds daft. It's true the camera is estimating JPG size and therefore the very last pic you take on that card might not fit -- but that should only affect the very last shot, not any others.

Also if you've had the cards for a while you can probably get one that's a lot bigger for not much money, assuming you don't already have the largest one the camera can use.

Not usually a problem, but if you've bought an 8GB card from somewhere like eBay, and it's actually a fake card that's only 4GB (or lower) and has been "hacked" into appearing as 8GB, then it will possibly cause problems like this as you approach the end of the space available.