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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?