Recovering deleted images from a fuji finepix 4700z smart media card

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Imaging Resource Discussion : One Thread

While trying to make room for one more picture on my smartmedia card I accidentally deleted all the images.

I am living in Japan and using the fuji finepix 4700z which may not be available or sold under a different name in the US.

I have been trying to find a way to recover these images but so far no luck. I have connected my camera to a windows 2000 machine with USB and used a number of file recovery utilities to read the resulting removable drive (which it tells me is FAT 12, which seems strange for a 64MB card)

I have found a number of utilities will read back files, but these files are all blank. When I attempt to load them into Photoshop I am told the jpeg is corrupted.

Looking at the files with winHex I found that they were indeed full of FF or OO, not a vaild jpeg file at all.

Using winHex to view valid jpeg files and to scan the card both before and after deletion I have found the following.

All jpegs start with the code FF D8 FF E1 and end with FF D9. The headers of Fuji images contain the word FUJIFILM twice in each header The headers also contain the date and time of the image twice For example, this is all of the streings from the header of a Fuji fine pix image, extracted usings linux "strings"

ÿØÿá Exif FUJIFILM FinePix4700Z Exif Viewer Ver.1.1 2001:02:26 22:47:05 0210 0100 2001:02:22 17:06:00 2001:02:22 17:06:00 FUJIFILM 0130 FINE 0100 ÿØÿÛ

The FAT table contains the names of the files but the files do not.

When a file is deleted using the finepix camera, it seems that: - the first character of the file name in the FAT table is removed - the entire header is erased - the start and end markers are removed

I have yet to identify a file block before and after deletion but I thought up some ideas about that today and will look into it tomorrow.

My question is basically if anyone has had any experience with Fuji images and noticed this exessive date overwrite that seems to be making it impossible for me to recover the files?

I could understand how this could happen if other images were written to the card after deletion. However I did a test, with a blank card, taking one image, saving it, erasing it and viewing the results and was amazed to find that the image data seems to have been wiped out.

Has anyone recovered images from a fuji camera? Any suggestions?

Thanks

Barnaby

-- Barnaby Wallace (bj_wallace@yahoo.com), December 19, 2001

Answers

After further tests and experimentation I have come to the conclusion that the FinePix4700z is consistently overwriting deleted images with the hex value FF (this shows in ASCII as a y with two dots over it).

So basically, once they are erased they are gone forever, assuming you don't have a CMOS tester that can read out the trace charge in the memory cells, which I don't.

If you have been able to recover any images but are unable to open them, try renaming the extension .txt and open it in a text editor. If the file is all y's then it has been overwritten. If you can see other information in there, then you may have a chance of getting it back.

I am trying to find out from Fuji why the camera does this and if it can be switched off, because I am very unhappy at losing pictures unecessarily.

Please let me know if you have any more information.

Good luck

Barnaby

-- Barnaby Wallace (bj_wallace@yahoo.com), February 17, 2002.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ