pglenn

I Use WinXP- SP-2. If you dont have a 'Scanners and Cameras' extension, you may want to try disableing 'Portable Devices', and 'Portable Devices Menu' (if you have these). Its possible microsoft has changed the name of the extension. I don't have win7, but maybe someone else here can identify the correct name of the extension in win7. Good Luck.

I don't have an iPhone- but the following has worked with other digital cameras I have used, so you can try it. Unplug your phone. Do a Google search for shexview. Its a small utility used to enable/disable windows shell etensions- no install required, its just a small executable. Open the program and look for the 'Scanners and Cameras' shell extension. Right-click the extension and click disable. Reboot the computer, then plug in the phone. With this extension disabled, Windows should install the device as an ordinary external usb drive. You can try using recuva on this drive. You can then re-enable the shell extension with shexview if you want to- (I myself prefer having it disabled) Hope this helps !

Did You actually write anything to the file ?? - If not it won't show up in Recuva, because by default Recuva doesn't show zero-byte files.

You can delete these files, pan2. The MFT is essentially a database file- that means it only gets bigger, and never gets smaller. If you download a zip file with 100,000 files in it, extract them and then delete those files, your MFT now has 100,000 entries that will never be deleted.-- The FILE DATA, ie the disk free space, can be overwritten, but neither Recuva nor CCleaner overwrite MFT entries, so these entries will always show up in recuva. But, you can get rid of them- 2 ways that I know of. 1. Download the freeware program Eraser, and use it to wipe disk free space- it DOES overwrite old MFT entries and sets the filesize to zero bytes. By default, Recuva does not show zero byte files, so they won't show up in the list. Keep in mind that NO deleted files will show up in recuva immediately after running eraser, so if you have something to recover, do it first. 2. The other option is to download Paragon Total Defrag. This is not freeware, but you should be able to use it in trial mode. It has on option to compact and trunicate the MFT, which will permanently remove all those invalid entries. -Hope this helps !

You can try this- it should make your camera show up as an ordinary usb drive, instead of a camera. Do a Google search for shellexview- this is a freeware shell extension manager from nirsoft.com. Open the program, search for the 'Scanners & Cameras' extension. Right click the extension and click disable. You will have to reboot your computer after doing this. Once you reboot, plug in your camera, and it should show up as a normal removable disk, instead of a camera. Once you are done, you can launch the program again, and enable 'Scanners & Cameras' again-- You will probably have to reboot for it to take effect. If this don't work, you can get a little sd card reader from -anywhere- for about $20, but I assume you don't want to spend any money

pauldf-- I've had this problem before and managed to fix it more than once. I can't guarantee it will work for you, but you can try it if nothing else works. You'll need a hex editor- I use the freeware editor HXD. Remove all usb drives attached to your computer except the corrupt one. With HXD, there is a button on the toolbar that says 'open disk'. The popup dialog will show Logical Disks and Physical Disks. You want to open the PHYSICAL DISK for the corrupted drive-- It should be labeled 'Removable Disk 1'. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE RIGHT DISK OR YOU WILL CORRUPT YOUR GOOD ONES !!!!!! If HXD opens it, you want to select / highlite approximately the first 64 kb / 128 sectors--. Right click the selected text and select 'Fill Selection'. In the dialog box that pops up, click the 'Zerobytes' button- then hit OK -MAKE SURE YOU SELECTED THE CORRECT DISK- then save. Close HXD, then unplug the drive. Plug it back in and try to access it- Windows should ask you to format it, and should now do it. Remember to do a QUICK format. If this works, you can then run Recuva in deep scan mode and retrieve your files.