corrupt photos?

Senpai_Nikon5200

New member
Most of the time it will appen for 2 reason cheap made in China memory card. Or wen you remove the card from a Windows computer without ejecting the card in Windows
 

Horoscope Fish

Senior Member
But there is absolutely no point of clearing the entire card (other than possibly security). OK, it does check for bad sectors and removes them from the disk map (more important for magnetic media than for semiconductor memory cards). But a quick format clears the FAT, which forgets about all files. The file area can be rewritten, and there is no advantage of it being zero before rewriting it. Zeroing all bytes just adds to the writing count (supposedly reducing card lifetime, and certainly increasing the time to do it). It offers no advantage.

And it should be formatted in the camera, which adds an extra file or two (the Nikon DCIM, etc), which also gets recreated by just turning the camera on, but the camera knows exactly how the card should be formatted. Users at the computer may or may not know.
Well you edited your post with the tiny tidbit that doing a proper format on the computer checks for, and attempts to correct, bad sectors on the media which is the whole point of my saying that "formatting" in-camera, which does NOT identify or correct bad sectors on the media, is NOT the same thing as doing a full-format on the computer. One of these formatting protocols identifies and potentially corrects bad sectors, the other does not. That seems to me to be a relatively important distinction to make here. I also don't see why bad sectors are any more, or less, important on specific media types since the final outcome, practically speaking, is the same.

Also, the DCIM/D3200 folders created by turning on the camera are just that: folders (not files). That's also an important distinction to make.
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WayneF

Senior Member
Or wen you remove the card from a Windows computer without ejecting the card in Windows

Eject won't hurt, but it is not really necessary when you are only reading the card. There is nothing to be saved if only reading.

Plus, memory cards are marked Quick Removal in the Windows Device Manager, meaning write caching is turned off, so even if you are writing to the card, it is done immediately, no risk about removal. This would NOT be true of external hard drives, but it is true of memory cards.

cache.jpg
 

WayneF

Senior Member
Also, the DCIM/D3200 folders created by turning on the camera are just that: folders (not files). That's also an important distinction to make.
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Folders are simply just files, with a DIR tag, which happen to contain additional FAT entries for that path. Re-formatting simply forgets about them too. They can be overwritten like anything else.

My notion is that semiconductors from good brands are much more reliable than magnetic disk surfaces.
 

vmx12n

Senior Member
I'll just point out doing an in-camera "reformat" does NOT reformat the cards file structure (FAT32). The only thing an in-camera reformat "reformats" is the FOLDER structure (i.e. DCIM/D3200 etc.) used by the camera to store photos. These are two HUGELY different things.

To properly reformat the SD Card (which *WILL* over-write all the data and re-create the File Allocation Table (FAT)), you need to do the following:

Put the card in a computer media reader.
Wait for the card to mount as an available drive.
RIGHT-click on the card and select "Format".
Clear the check-box for "Quick Format".
Click "OK".
You'll get a warning about erasing your files.
Continue with the format.
Go make a cup of tea because this is going to take a while.​

On my Core i7 computer at home with 16GB of RAM, reformatting a 32GB SD card takes about half an hour. I assure everyone our Nikon DSLR's are not performing this same feat in a fraction of a second when we "reformat" our SD cards in-camera. Lastly and speaking only for myself, any card that fails to re-format properly in my computer, or gives me any kind of error message in-camera, even once, gets exchanged for a new card, or the card gets trashed. They get no second chances, ever.
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That is an important point. These cards can be temperature sensitive and can also be statically zapped by handling in dry climates. Once the camera gives you an sd card error message, you are gambling with your pictures from then on.
 

thequeenscheese

Senior Member
anyway for anyone that wants one/needs one I've found a free recovery program called pandora that works really well it found 87 of the pics I'd taken but in honesty I think the class4 card was simply too slow and aided in the corruption process at the source rather than the transfer process.

also the easeu prog worked of which I have a version and a keygen that I can pass on to anyone that would like it..
 
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