Finding out your flash card is unreadable is the digital equivalent of opening your old 35-mm camera while the film is still in it. Fortunately, you can often recover digital files. Here, we'll use a free tool called "Recuva" to scan for and recover deleted or corrupted photo files.
Instructions
Get Recuva and Get Your Photos Back
1. Visit recuva.com (see Resources below) and download the program to your desktop. Once it's there, double click it to install.
2. Insert your card into your card reader or attach your camera to your computer. It's important not to write any new data to the card because you can overwrite your pictures, so don't add anything to it after connecting it.
3. Launch Recova, the program you just installed. You will start out in a "wizard" mode, which walks you through the recovery process. Click "Next" on the first screen of the wizard to begin.
4. On the next screen, tick the box that corresponds with the type you want to recover. Since you're interested in pictures, click the "Pictures" box.
5. Select the drive or media card you wish to scan. In this case, you're scanning removable storage, so select "On my media card or iPod" and continue to the next screen.
6. Select "Start" to begin scanning. If the scan comes back with files, you're in luck. If it doesn't, it will ask if you'd like to scan the drive again with a "Deep Scan." Click "Yes," but be aware that a deep scan will take at least twice as long as a standard scan.
7. Select the pictures to recover. If your pictures were found, they should now appear in the main Recuva window. Select the ones you'd like to recover and click "Recover." This will bring up a dialogue asking where you want to save the files. Select a destination and click "OK."
Tags: click Recover, media card, next screen, your card, your pictures