Okay so I followed the illustrious advice of those on this site and purchased a Canon Powershot S3. So far on the camera. Hickup came last week. We were in Maryland and it was 90 something and the camera was in the car for about 1 and 1/2 hours. That night we go to take some pictures and it says Memory card error and 700 pictures are gone

We take it to a couple stores and they can read it but say we could try and send it back to their labs for 40 bucks and see if they can recover it. They also recommend reformatting it if we don't want to try and recover it.

The card is a Kingston Elite Pro 1 GB 50X SD card. Worked fine for the last 6 months or so. When we went to reform at (gave up on trying to send it back as we were back in the UK) it shows 500mb used. So it looks like something is still on the camera.

Any ideas on how to recover? Should we try and send it back or are there any programs that we can use to recover?

Any assistance greatly appreciated. We are overseas so can't run down to any local radio shacks or anything.

Good call on the camera though, we love it so far.

 

Okay, if you want to recover your pics, I suggest you send the card in.
If you don't want to recover your pics, I suggest you do not use that card again.

I say this because I have had similar things happen. I ended up reusing the same card after formatting, and it was fine for a while, but the same thing happened again. It is better to get a replacement card, since I am sure they carry a lifetime warrenty anyway.
I did send the card back the second time and there were able to recover most of the pics.

Good luck.

 

Sorry to hear. I had a similar thing happen with one of my cards, fortunately it was before I shot any pics. It was also a Kingston. I would stay away from that brand for mem cards. As said you might have some luck sending it in. I tried a few regular things on mine and was not able to get it working again. Sandisk and Lexar are the best brands for mem cards, from what Ive seen.

ps. the heat probably didn't help.

 

Sandisk and Lexar. FTW

 

I had a memory card reader that was defective and kept screwing up pictures. I found a free or shareware program that was able to recover some pictures off the card. Search downloads.com and you might be able to find something. I'll check the computer at home and see what it was called.

Edit: Here's one - not sure if it is the same one I used, though:

http://www.download.com/PC-Inspector...ml?tag=lst-0-1

 

Photorescue FTW.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/

I was able to recover hundreds of pictures from a corrupted hard disk using this program.

Tips:
1) Do NOT write anything to the card until you have given up. Every byte you write to the disk will potentially cause another picture to be unrecoverable.
2) Most programs have an option to 'image' the memory card/hard disk to disk, and then work off the image. I recommend this because you don't need to screw with the memory card anymore, and the entire process should go much quicker
3) Don't use that memory card again.
4) Many photo recovery tools have trial modes where you can preview what pictures are recoverable, but not recover them. So you should be able to see which tools recover more picturese.

And I don't usually soapbox, but if you try photorescue, and like it, I hope you buy it.
It's not expensive, and it's awesome. please support great software!!!
I'm not associated with the company, but this program has totally saved my ass.

 

Thanks for the tips. We were going to buy another disk as a backup anyway so I guess I will spend the extra bucks and get a better one. I will try the rescue photo first and if we get nothing we will send it back. Just a pain in the ass.

Thanks for the tips. Will let you know if any of them work out.