Blip Disaster - almost

Traumatic evening.

Was just demonstrating the highest shutter speed possible on my Nikon D70s when suddenly the LCD started to flash up 'CHA' and the screen said 'This card cannot be used'.

This is the first time I have had a corrupt Compact Flash card. Normally it would be mildy annoying (none of the shots on it were very special (see yesterday)). But this was Wednesday, and it had Tuesday's blip on it. So if I hadn't been able to recover it, I would have ended up with a blank day after 11 months of not missing one!

So i tried everything I could to recover the NEF images on the card. Card could not be read by my PC. Tried

RescuePro (which came with the card)
Card Recovery
PC Inspector File Recovery (took all night to run)

None of which worked.

Finally I tried

Testdisc and Photorec - they worked! They are pretty basic and it is not totally obvious how to use them, but they are FREE and open-source.

As you can see from yesterday's blip, I did not recover a masterpiece. But it was a good lesson in how to recover photos from a corrupt card when you really need to.

Bookmark the above links in case you ever end up in the doodoo.