# Corrupted/screwed up Smart Card - image recovery? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 17, 2006, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrupted-screwed-up-smart-card-image-recovery/364894 "2006-07-17T18:02:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2006, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrupted-screwed-up-smart-card-image-recovery/364894/1 "2006-07-17T18:02:04Z")
A Smart Card I’ve been using for some time in an Olympus digital camera has become “damaged” - meaning that both the camera and a separate card reader do not recognize the images on it (the camera gives me a mysterious error message and the card reader erroneously thinks that the card needs to be formatted, which would erase the 100+ images stored on it). There is no visible physical damage to the card. I’ve tried using recovery freeware from PC Inspector but this does not retrieve any usable images. Does anyone know of any (free or inexpensive) software or recovery service that might help recover the images on this card? Thanks. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2006, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrupted-screwed-up-smart-card-image-recovery/364894/2 "2006-07-17T18:08:40Z")
Others you can try: [Smart Flash Recovery](http://www.smartpctools.com/flash_recovery/) [eIMAGE Recovery](http://www.snapfiles.com/features/eimagerecovery-8032-474720.php) The first one’s freeware, and seems to be pretty popular, and the second one costs $27 to buy, but has a free trial. Presumably, the free trial will go so far as to say “I’ve found files. Buy me if you want to recover them.” - a common trial tactic. Once you recover whatever you can, get a new card. They’ve gotten cheap and they do have a finite number of read/write cycles before they start going goofy. ---
**Author:** ![freckafree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/freckafree/32/3050_2.png) [@freckafree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/freckafree)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2006, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrupted-screwed-up-smart-card-image-recovery/364894/3 "2006-07-17T19:50:56Z")
I had the same problem with my Smart Card (maybe it’s really a Dumb-ass Card) last week, and **astro** turned me onto this: > **[Memory Card Recovery Software to Recover Lost Photos - CardRecovery](https://www.cardrecovery.com/)** > > Card Recovery will recover lost, deleted and formatted digital photos from all digital memory card. This photo recovery software offers digital image recovery, digital picture recovery, data recovery and digital media recovery. They apparently have a free trial download so you can see if you can recover your images before you buy. That was not available for the Mac version, so I bit the bullet and paid $40 anyway, and the software worked like a charm. Well worth it. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2006, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/corrupted-screwed-up-smart-card-image-recovery/364894/4 "2006-07-17T21:01:08Z")
> [@freckafree](#): > > I had the same problem with my Smart Card (maybe it’s really a Dumb-ass Card) last week, and **astro** turned me onto this: > > [http://www.cardrecovery.com/](http://www.cardrecovery.com/) > > They apparently have a free trial download so you can see if you can recover your images before you buy. That was not available for the Mac version, so I bit the bullet and paid $40 anyway, and the software worked like a charm. Well worth it. I second card recovery. It works great!