■ Fahrenheit/Celsius. Flash media is designed
to operate between 5°C and 55°C. Industrial
flash media is designed to operate between
–40°C and 85°C.
■ H 2 O. Water is a hazard to media. Liquids in
general, including Jolt Cola and every other
sugary-sweet soda, are even worse.
■ Extraction. Pulling out the media from the
camera while it’s writing to disk, or pulling
out media from the USB flash reader while
it’s writing.
■ Read failure. Media readers that are
incompatible with the operating system or
the drivers on the operating system.
■ Old age. Even though flash media are
solid-state, the contact surfaces do wear off.
In addition, they become covered in finger-
print oil. This won’t kill a card, however.Physical damage to a flash media card, such as that
from water, soda, or exposure, is difficult or impossi-
ble to recover from; however, formatting or deletion
errors, electrostatics, or a corrupt (or virus-riddled)
computer can be reversed. Software is available
for every operating system to help you recover
from these seemingly irreversible errors.
Recovering files from flash media does not require
any technical skills thanks to today’s easy-to-use
software. You will need to know a little about file
structure and the way files are stored on a disk
drive; aside from that, you are steps away from
recovering lost files.
The most powerful software programs for digital
photographers aside from Photoshop are, surpris-
ingly, freeware applications: PC Inspector’s File
Recovery and the more advanced WinHex. This
chapter shows you how to use the File Recovery application to restore files. WinHex
is very powerful, but also confusing for those who do not understand hexadecimal
and binary storage.98 ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TODIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
If you’ve been fortu-
nate to this point and
haven’t had any media failures,
you might be in the minority. The
author had his Smartmedia give
up the ghost with 120 images,
thanks to a USB card reader with
a firmware issue. Ninety images
were recovered successfully—the
rest went down with the Titanic.This chapter focuses
on using a file recovery
tool for Windows. Mac users
should investigate Image Rescue
from Lexar Media, PhotoRescue
by DataRescue, or Recovery PRO
by CompuApps.