I shoot a lot of concerts, using a Nikon D100. Periodically, I’ve been starting to have some issues while shooting, almost always when I only have a shot or two left on the card. What will happen is the card will ‘freeze up’ and I will get a display message on the LCD that says File does not contain image data. I can’t do anything at this point.
At that point, I have found that i can generally turn off the camera, reseat the card, and turn the camera back on. Then I get the same message, but I can also scroll through the images on the card. When I get to the ‘No Image Data’ file, i can delete it and keep shooting.
I haven’t really paid attention, but I’m starting to think that this is only happening with one particular memory card. That could be wishful thinking, though…
So anyway, last night I’m shooting, and I get the situation detailed above. However, this time, I can’t follow my normal work-around, instead I get a message that says ‘Folder contains no photographs’ while the camera control screen (where it tells me among other things how many pics are left) tells me that the card is full.
Any thoughts on how i can recover the shots on this card? I don’t have a CF reader, I normally just hook the camera directly the computer via mini USB.
I have attached the camera up to the computer and attempted to initiate the transfer sequence. When I tried to do that, the program (Nikon Xfer 6) told me that there was ‘no compact flash card in the attached camera’
I then inserted another CF card in the camera, and it immediately recognized it and began to transfer the data.
So I’m beginning to think that the card is fried. Still, does anybody know how to try to recognize the data?
This may not be very useful information, as you said you didn’t have a card reader external to the camera, but I run into a similar problem with a Smartmedia card. I tried many recovery programs and was hoping to find one that was free or shareware. The best I found was a free one from http://pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm , so if you can get to a reader, it might be worth a try. It was a VERY slow program, but it was the only one that worked in my case.
Name tag’s advice is about your only real option. If you need an additional reason to get a reader, I have found that getting the pictures off compact flash using the stand alone readers is generally quicker and easier than using the hokey software that tends to come with cameras.
I have a Nikon 750 that causes me A LOT of grief, paticularly when trying to get the pictures off with their software and a Win32 machine. At the time I had a Mandrake 9.1 Linux machine and for grins plugged the camera in. Bam, Mandrake treated it like a newly mounted drive/directory (it even auto-detected and mounted). All my photos were just sitting there in that mount waiting to be copied off.
On my Fedora Core One machine, I have to manually mount it with this, but once it’s mounted it’s essentially just a directory:
No - no Linux here. I’ve been using my Windows machine to xfer photos, b/c I actually like the Nikon View software for sorting my images before I dump them into photoshop.
Unfortunately, there is no Mac platform (which is my main workstation - a G4 with OSX) for the Nikon software, and iphoto won’t recognize my Nikon directly.
Sigh…
I guess i’ll have to pick up a flash reader after all.