[SGVLUG] Anyone with experience recovering data from flash memory (camera card)

[Emerson, Tom]

Over the weekend I took a bunch of pictures of our rocket launch

At my brother-in-law's house, I was using his laptop to view the photos
(since his laptop has a built-in memory slot that takes Fuji's "XD"
memory...)  Of course, this meant I was using XP.

At one point, moving from picture-to-picture froze up, so I pulled the
card, closed the app, put in the card, and selected "open folder" when
the card was detected -- all was fine.  This happened a few more times,
then "boom" -- re-inserting the card didn't bring up the "what should I
do with this?" box, so I manually tried to open drive E:  At this point,
the system said, "device not formatted" -- accckkk!!! I hadn't "saved"
them to anything more permanent (partly because it wasn't my own system,
and partly because it is a 1gb memory stick...) so now I'm hosed!

I suspect the application that was viewing things semi-slide-show like
[with forward/back, rotate, and resize buttons...] was /writing/
temporary files to the device, and upon hanging, "pulling the card"
resulted in a corrupt directory or "superblock" [hence why XP thinks it
isn't formatted]  I rather doubt the /entire/ contents of the card are
scrambled as it is a gigabyte sized flash card (and, well, even flash
memory takes a while to write...)

*I hope* I can mount this under linux as a raw device and use "dd" to
copy the contents of the flash card to a file, then perhaps I can
determine the extent of any "damage" and eventually recover "the file"
as a mountable partition [using a loop device]  Barring that, what tools
[dos/windows or linux based] would anyone recommend to recover the data?

This might be a real outside chance, but does anyone else think that a
windows "quick format" followed by an "unformat" operation would recover
the corrupted superblock? [if, indeed, that is the problem...]  Does
windows even support or include the "unformat" command anymore? (or
unerase, or was that always a norton-utility program?)

Likewise, if the "dd" trick works to capture viable contents of the
memory, how much of a freshly-formatted memory stick would I have to
write over the "corrupted" image to repair it to a point to retrieve the
files?

Tom