I have an Olympus D-320L and when trying to erase a single shot I mistakenly erased all the images. Is there ANY way to recover these images?

-- Dana W Nyson (ncc@iserv.net), August 05, 1999

Answers

I'm not sure. But a guy in my office has a Kodak camera with CardFlash media and the PCMCIA Adapter to read the cards into his notebook computer. The CardFlash/PCMCIA shows up as a disk drive in Windows 98. If SmartMedia works in a similar fashion, it is conceivable that you could use a disk utility to unerase the deleted pictures. However, if the camera "zeros" the memory space when deleting pix, unerase definitely won't work.

-- Dave Schambach (DSchambach@Compuserve.com), August 05, 1999.

bbbbbbbbDana,

That's a tough one. I'll tell you what I know from my experience.

I have a Toshiba PDR-M1, which like your Olympus, uses smartmedia cards for storage. I basically did the same thing that you did shortly after receiving the camera. What I ended up doing was hitting the user's forums and tech support at Toshiba. I bought a Lexar Digital Film Reader(I wanted one anyhow, the serial downloads were glacially slow at best!) and downloaded a program off the net called RecoverNT.(It works in win95/98 as well) It's a disk recovery program, seemingly a very good one. It could find the erased files, but I wasn't able to open any that it restored. I called Toshiba about this and they maintain that once they're gone, they're gone!

At any rate, I was unsucessful. But it might be worth a try with your camera if the camera doesn't actually screw the erased files up as the PDR-M1 apparently does.

It's a bit odd to me, since I "assumed" that one of two things would happen: either the files would be completely non-existant because of the internal storage methods employed on the smartmedia chips or that if I could see the filename with a recovery program I'd be able to restore them since the "delete" was in reality just a tossing away of the "index" to the files. Alas, it seems that a third possibility exists in which the "index" could be restored, but for some apparently brain damaged reason Toshiba elected to trash the actual file data or at least trash enough of it that the restored file couldn't be accessed as a jpeg.

I wish you luck. As I said, it may be different for your camera or it may be that the smartmedia itself performs this strange form of deletion. Beats me, but good luck.

What did I do? I gave up after a week of goofing around and trained myself to pay more attention to what I was doing so I wouldn't do it again. Darn near ruined a good rolled-up newspaper doing it too... :-)

-- Gerald Payne (gmp@francorp.francomm.com), August 06, 1999.