Ejected SD Card While Camera Was Recording Video - Nikon D5200

N

natelan

New member
Hello all, thanks in advance for your time and consideration to my current dilemma.


Last night, my brother's rock band performed their first concert. I recorded it in 1080p/30fps with my Nikon D5200. Unfortunately, I made a huge mistake and ejected the memory card from the camera while it was still recording video. I feel like such an idiot. Beer may have played into the equation...


The memory card has it's usual DCIM>>D5200 folder structure, but the folders are empty. HOWEVER, Windows Explorer indicates that the memory card is half full, despite there being 0 files on the card. That tells me that the video file is still present somewhere on that SD card. Whether or not the data is corrupted or playable is another matter entirely, but I'd really like to pull that data off the card and see if there's something there I can work with.


I have spent all morning researching this problem, and I have used two different tools so far; Testdisk and Zero Assumption Recovery. Both applications found a few DELETED files on the disk, but did not locate or migrate the many-GB video file I recorded last night.


Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
Last edited:
4

480sparky

Senior Member
Recovery software looks for 'markers' that are placed at the beginning and end of a file. Since you didn't stop the recording, there's no 'end' to the file and the software won't recover it.

I'm sure there's someone out there that can recover the video, but I doubt you'll want to pay that much.
 
N

natelan

New member
Thanks for the feedback, Sparky. I agree with you, that the data is probably unrecoverable, or at least cost prohibitively speaking.

But I don't want to discourage others from chiming in, in case someone else might have an idea... I'm open to even off-the-wall crazy suggestions at this point.

Thanks again, everyone!
 
N

nickt

Senior Member
Did you try photorec which is included with the testdisk download? I'm not fluent in the use of testdisk or photorec, but they do amazing things. You might want to post on the bleepingcomputer forum. They have helped me several times. It would not surprise me if someone there could talk you through recovering that file even though it was never finalized.
 
N

natelan

New member
Yes, I have tried Photorec and Test Disk. In fact, I'm still playing with both of them as we speak. They are command line interface, and not very intuitive, so I'm just sort of trying everything. Although, I am being careful not to write anything to the disk, but I don't think that would necessarily be a problem in this instance, because the data was never "deleted", and therefore is not in re-writable space. In fact, Windows does indicate that half of the card's storage capacity is in use, even though there are supposedly no files on the disk. It's almost like the video is tauntingly close to being available, but nothing has worked so far... All the applications I've tried so far seem to do a great job at recovering deleted files, but I haven't found the magic bullet to recover this incomplete file...

The search continues.

Thanks again for the suggestions so far.

Oh, and lol@pretzal... If their show hadn't been very good, I wouldn't have bothered with all this... I would just record their next show... But to be honest, it was a really, very good show, and they had many patrons in the audience and it was a great atmosphere. Hence why I am trying to get this file working.
 
Last edited:
N

natelan

New member
OK, so some progress to report so far... I still don't have the file on my PC just yet, but I found a tool on the internet called "Mini Tool Power Data Recovery" which acknowledges that there is a Quicktime movie file on the card. That in itself is a huge step forward.

Now the problem is that Mini Tool Power Data Recovery thinks the file is 64,125.26 TERABYTES, LOL... Thus, the program states that my other hard disks are too small to recover the file to another drive...

I won't give up!
 
Top