Pause. Catch breath. Repeat.

[steuard]

Kim and I got back from a 1 1/2 week trip yesterday night. Today was spent busily doing laundry, paying bills, and otherwise catching up on work and personal stuff. And tomorrow morning, we head back out of town for another 1 1/2 week trip. It's a busy chunk of summer, but we're still enjoying it.

I've already sketched out our schedule in a previous entry, so I won't repeat myself here. The two parties in the San Francisco area were a lot of fun; I've clearly gotten better at the whole "large social gatherings" thing over the years (and maybe the parties have gotten a little smaller). I don't have time to share details or stories at the moment, but perhaps I will after we're back from the next trip. It was great seeing so many friends and other cool people while we were there!

We also had a great time exploring Yosemite, Sequoia, and the city of San Francisco along the way. I'd share pictures of the parks, but I made the unhappy discovery today that at some point between our last morning in Yosemite and now, our digital camera decided that its memory card was actually unformatted and contained no data. So unless someone knows of a good way to recover memory from an xD flash memory card (or to figure out if it's somehow actually the camera at fault), it looks like we'll have to keep all those beautiful memories of fast-tumbling waterfalls and mountain lakes to ourselves.

But for now, it's time for sleep and then an early departure to Chicago. I'll say more once we're back!

Comments

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

I'd probably try to attach the memory card to a computer, do a raw copy of the card to something on the computer, and then try to do filesystem recovery on that. (They use the old MS-DOS filesystem.) Depending on how much you want the photos and your tolerance for frustrating computer experiences, of course.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

What's a good tool for a raw copy of an unmountable disk device on a Mac? :) And for that matter, know any good free disk recovery utilities that might work? I'm pretty much a novice at this sort of thing.

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

You probably have dd available to you. Or even cat. For disk recovery on a mac ... dunno. You might have an appropriate version of fsck available. Beth says that the disk recovery program she bought might work. (not free, no.) How urgent is it? How much do you care if you lose the data?

[steuard.livejournal.com]

My very brief attempt to use dd before we left didn't go anywhere, but that may have just been a lack of familiarity with the tool. (I got some sort of read error when doing a naive redirect of /dev/disk1 to a storage file, I think, and I didn't have time to go hunting through the man page for details.) On the other hand, it's also possible that the camera itself is refusing access to what it views as an unformatted memory card.

The level of urgency is fairly low (I presumably have until the next time I want to use the camera, anyway), and I've already reconciled myself to losing the data, so any chance of recovery at this point will feel like an unexpected bonus. Also, it looks like we may be able to (eventually) test whether it's the card or the camera that's at fault: Kim's mother has a printer that can read xD cards directly, so we could try plugging it in there and see what happens.

In any case, we won't be able to do a thing until we get back from this trip, as the camera is currently resting at home in LA. :)

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

I'd definitely try reading it with something other than the camera. A printer is OK, a port on a computer or a dedicated USB reader would be better.

[zathrus.livejournal.com]

As one novice speaking to another.... I can't tell you anything about data recovery software or the likes, but I can tell you that when we had a hard drive crash right before J was born, we had very good luck paying someone else to struggle with all that for us. :) We found a guy who ran a computer fix-it business on the side, during evenings and weekends, and were very satisfied with the results. Of course, for just a camera card, it might not be worth it, but then, the same is true of struggling with software and frustrating computers.

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