The parameter is incorrect.

[torchddv]

I have a 256MB XD card from my Olympus C-765. My laptop has a built-in card reader (SD/MMC/MS/XD). The controller is an O2Micro Integrated MS/MSPRO/xD controller. I'm running 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 on a dual-core with 8GB and an NVIDIA 9800M GTS and dual hard drives.

 

Today when I was plugging it into my laptop to retrieve the photos of my grandson's birthday party yesterday, my finger slipped and the card popped back out just as Windows gave it's little beep-boop announcing the arrival of a card, followed immediately by the announcement that the card had left the building.

 

Now when I plug the card in, Windows advises that it must be formatted to use it. I canceled, ejected and reinstalled in the camera. The camera offers me the choice of powering down or formatting the card so I powered down.

 

The card shows up in "My Computer" as "Removable Disk (E:)". Used space, free space and capacity are all shown as 0 bytes. Windows claims that "This device is working properly".

 

After a Google search, I downloaded Recuva to see if it could recover anything. Following the wizard, I selected "Pictures" then "On my media card or IPod" then "enable deep scan". I get a big empty box with the message "The parameter is incorrect" below.

 

Switch to advanced mode, it shows and XD icon beside xD-Picture Card (E:) on the upper left drop-down box, .jpg|.png|.raw|.gif|.jpeg beside a white X in a red box, nothing listed under Filename or Path, "No file selected in the preview pane and "The parameer is incorrect." at the bottom left.

 

If I select the either of the hard drives and hit scan, that message changes to "Searching.." while a progress bar pops up in its own little box. If I go back to the XD card, I get "The parameter is incomplete" message again and no scan bar or box.

 

I tried plugging it in to my antique desktop running 32bit XP SP3 with an panel-mounted USB 2.0 card reader and I get no further in the recovery process, but the message says "Boot Sector Not Found" instead of "The parameter is incorrect".

 

Any suggestions on what to try next, or did I fry my card when my finger slipped?

[DennisD]

Hi torchddv.

 

It sounds like the "hot" pull has screwed up the MBR, and all data, as you've found out, is now recognized by Windows as RAW, and sadly Recuva doesn't as of yet handle RAW data.

 

Have a look at "PhotoRec", a freeware tool which does, and it should enable you to recover those important photographs.

 

PhotoRec:

 

PhotoRec Step By Step:

 

It looks like command line, but isn't, and has a structured dialogue to follow. Follow the "step by step" guide, and see if it'll do the job for you. If you get stuck, post back and I'll do my best to help.

 

There are other options, but trying to recover your files with PhotoRec is the best first step.

[torchddv]

Have a look at "PhotoRec", a freeware tool which does, and it should enable you to recover those important photographs.

 

I tried PhotoRec and it couldn't see the card at all, so I moved on. However, after reading your post and thinking about it, I decided to try it in the old XP desktop. It found the card in that machine, and is grinding away at it right now.

 

I don't know if it's a 64 bit Win 7 thing (and yes, I did run it as Administrator) or the O2Micro controller card handling the card reader (the desktop reader is USB).

 

I'll let you know how I make out, and thanks for your assistance.

[torchddv]

Nope. No luck, 0 files found. Ran it as Admin, ran it in a command prompt window, with and without Paranoid, brute force -- no difference, no files found.

[DennisD]

I think you're right about the 64bit thing, and I should have checked which OS you had, although I'm pleased you sussed it yourself.

 

I would suggest you now try "EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition", the free version only allowing the recovery of 1GB of data, but as you're only after pics of your grandsons birthday, I'm thinking 1GB should be enough?

 

EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition:

 

Data Recovery Wizard supports hardware RAID and hard drive, USB drive, SD card, memory card, etc. It provides the comprehensive data recovery solution for computer users to recover lost data.

 

On my XP machine, it does pick up my SD card in the card reader OK as long as it's inserted before launching the program.

[torchddv]

On the Win7 -64 bit machine, Easeus picks up the card, but only if Partition recovery is selected -- the other two only show the hard drives. Then it shows an explorer-like window with "Raw Files" to the left and a check box. No files listed in the right pane. Clicking on the "Raw Files" puts a blue checkmark in the box and a message window flashes by too fast to read. Multiple repeated fast clicking shows the message is "Please wait a minute as there are too many files in the directory you selected". Nothing happens after that. Ever.

 

On the XP - 32 bit machine the same thing applies up to clicking on the check box. Then a list of files appears in the right pane. click next, choose a place to save them on the hard drive, next again and Easeus claims it recovered so many hundreds of files. Off to the recovery directory and there are all the thumbnail images of my pictures! Two of each in fact. Every second one is low-res when opened -- must be the camera's own thumbnalls, which makes sense because every second file that Easeus found was on the order of 5kb. So the big ones should be the pictures, and some of them are. A few are corrupted -- grey bar across the top, etc. The oldest 100 or so pictures are mostly intact. The newer pictures produce "Drawing Failed" in Microsoft Picture and Fax Viewer or a strange kaleidoscope in Photo shop.

 

I tried again with the same results.

 

So now I'm trying to figure out if this is a sign of catastrophic failure of the memory card, or another OS issue, or a bug in Easeus.

[DennisD]

So now I'm trying to figure out if this is a sign of catastrophic failure of the memory card, or another OS issue, or a bug in Easeus.

 

Recovering any type of file isn't an exact science sadly, and image files can be corrupt in a number of ways. I've had the same "drawing failed" message when trying out different recovery programs.

 

There are still a number of things to try, but there's absolutely no promise that the results would be any better. The first thing I would suggest is to try a freeware program which has much better results at opening damaged image files than windows picture viewer.

 

IrfanView:

 

It's compatible with both XP and Win 7.

 

On a different note, If you're doing your scanning via a "card reader" you may get different results connecting your camera via usb with the card in it. Worth a try.

 

And there is always the last resort of carrying out a "quick" format of the memory card, and then scan with Recuva. I emphasis "quick" format because this won't erase the data on the card, it will just tell windows that the space it occupies is available to be overwritten.

 

There's the option of scanning for a "lost partition", and there's also the option of trying to rebuild the MBR (Master Boot Record).

 

All these things are worth trying, but if we get to there you should really install "USB Image Tool" which can make an Image back up of your camera card, which will then enable you to restore the card back to it's current state if one of the afore mentioned options didn't yield any results. You are then back to your current state to try the next option.

 

USB Image Tool:

 

There's also a free utility which can write a Master Boot Record/Partition Table to an Image file, and another free tool which can mount an Image file as a drive, and it may then be possible to open that drive and recover files.

 

The time this would take is not an issue for me at all, it would be up to you how far you want to take it.

 

And although I would guide you where needed through any or all of these processes, you can get an idea of the software tools I'm talking about in this previous thread ...

 

http://forum.pirifor...l=&fromsearch=1

 

We were banging our heads against the wall from the start due to the U3 software installation on the drive, which makes windows recognize it as a read only CDRom, but I have tried all the software in that thread, and the methods do work with a sound flash drive or camera card.

 

Try opening your images with IrfanView, and see what that does, and if that fails, and you're up for it, we'll try something else.

[DennisD]

Just been doing some tests with recovered photographs which gave me the "drawing failed" message when trying to open them with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

 

This sample recovered image on the left, which wouldn't open, showed all the correct exif information ...

 

 

 

... but returned the "drawing failed" error.

 

IrfanView opened that image with no problems, and when saved off (the image on the right), it again showed the correct exif information but opened full size as it should.

 

Two other Image editing programs, PhotoFiltre and PhotoScape, couldn't open the same recovered image.

 

So IrfanView actually can open and re-save images which would otherwise be deemed as corrupt and only useful as thumbnail sized "better than nothing" pictures.

 

I can't say whether this would work with every single example of a recovered image giving the "drawing failed" error, but it worked this afternoon with a recovered folder containing 26 "drawing failed" images.

[torchddv]

Irfanview doesn't give the "drawing failed" message, but of those photos, there's large chunks of missing. Usually the top 1/10 to 1/2 appears then grey below.

 

I created an image with USB image tool, did a quick format on the XP machine and now I'm trying to see if anything can be recovered.

[DennisD]

... there's large chunks of missing. Usually the top 1/10 to 1/2 appears then grey below.

 

It sounds like the state of the recovered photographs could be due to "backfilling".

 

A camera card can be fragmented like a hard drive, and bits of photographs are spread around the card. When intact, the file system keeps tabs on all these fragmented bits, but when it gets screwed up it may be impossible to recover all the bits of each photograph. The resultant recovery could be photos with parts missing, or even two photographs mashed together.

 

I had a link with a very good explanation of this, but the web page has gone. The above more or less describes it.

 

After transferring photos from my SD card, I always do a full and complete format even though the card is only partly used. So if I have a problem before any new photographs are on my computer, they're unlikely to be fragmented. That's my assumption, and with the testing I've done, it seems to work as expected.

 

Not much use to you, but for the future, and for others following this thread, it's a good practice to adopt.

 

Good luck with what you're trying. Fingers crossed for you.

[torchddv]

Well, it could be fragmented as you say. I did delete some old photos one day to make some room "on the fly" as it were and the card hadn't been formatted since. Most of the intact photos were older ones, which would fit with your theory.

 

I have tried several different approaches and recovery programs now that I found reference to on the web with pretty much the same results each time. It would seem that whatever file system is used by Olympus, nothing is available to rebuild the fractured files. Fortunately, I had already downloaded the photos of my 5 hour old grandson taken a few hours before, and fortunately my son also took photos of my older grandson's birthday (yes, two different grandsons from two different sons share the same birthday. I can wish any grandchild "Happy Birthday" on July 4 and have a 50/50 chance of being right!)

 

Thanks for all your advice, but I think it's time to admit defeat.

[hazelnut]

Olympus use the raw .orf file format. There is a supposed orfrepair tool but of course it costs.

 

I did read that one person had had a bit of success by converting the files to dng format. If you feel there is nothing to loose anyway.....

 

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5024

 

Info on how to view them afterwards (just in case there's a miricle and it works)

 

http://mansurovs.com/how-to-view-dng-thumbnails-in-windows

[DennisD]

In case you return to the thread, the purpose of making an Image backup was to restore the Image if formatting didn't yield better results.

 

Restore the card back to where it was, and there are other options, such as trying to rewrite the Master Boot Record with partitioning software (free). Because the card was damaged only by a "hot" remove, a repair is a possibility.