Compact Flash Recovery

For the last few months my Canon A85 has been the epitome of reliability. From point, shoot and transfer to PC, it's never skipped a beat.

Tonight, the CF card (a 256MB ridata unit) suddenly proclaimed itself corrupted and refused to talk to the camera. It also refused to talk to any computers, whether being read as a scsi device under linux or a removable disc under winXP.

(I have a CF card reader which means I don't have to go through the camera's silly menus. It treats the removable media like a CD or floppy disk so I can just copy and paste from the CF card to my storage area. Just to complicate things, I have a few large disks in my Linux box which are shared out over the home network so that any windows machine can see them. This makes things easier.)

Time for some disc recovery!

A quick google search revealed two main options:

• PC Inspector

PC Inspector searched through the CF card for about an hour (with no trace of activity on the Card Reader light) before claiming no files recovered.

• Zero Assumption Recovery

Zero Assumption Recovery whirred away (actually using the card, if the activity light was to be believed) before finding nothing.

It looks like the controller on the card itself is shot, so neither program could reasonably have been expected to work. However, Zero Assumption Recovery seemed to actually try to do anything.