A family from Kenilworth took a fortnight in the Dolomites and filled the first week of the card with walking, a wedding anniversary and the only photographs anyone has of the grandfather at the top of a cable car. On the Monday of the second week the camera stopped and said the card could not be accessed and would have to be formatted. They tried it in a laptop, in a phone reader borrowed from a neighbour and in a second camera, and got nothing anywhere. They came home with the card in a sandwich bag and rang the following morning.
| Media | An SD card from a compact camera that worked for a week and then began reporting that it could not be accessed. The images no longer appear in the camera or on a computer. It holds a fortnight's holiday photographs. |
| What was reported | Camera SD card, worked for the first week of a holiday, then reported that it could not be accessed and offered a format, photographs no longer visible in the camera or on a laptop, everything tried before the family got home. |
| Fault class | Filesystem damage. The card's memory and its controller were both answering normally, and what had broken was the small set of structures at the front that record what is on the card and where each picture sits. The images themselves were untouched and had never been erased. |
| On the bench | Held behind a hardware write blocker from the moment it arrived so no repair tool, camera or operating system could alter it. Imaged read-only through a controlled reader in a single pass with the weaker regions given their own attempt. The surviving directory records were parsed from that image, each photograph rebuilt by following its own allocation chain where the chain held, and carved by content signature only where a record had gone. Every image was rendered and looked at before the set was written to fresh media. |
A card does not lose its pictures because it stops mounting. Photographs occupy the bulk of the memory; the index that describes them occupies a few kilobytes at the front. Damage that small set and the camera has no idea what is present, so it offers the only thing it knows how to do, which is to write a new empty one. The pictures behind it have not moved.
Failing partway through a card is a pattern with a cause. Cards write sequentially, so the first week fills the early part of the memory and the second week fills the next. A cell that fails, or a write interrupted when the camera is switched off at the wrong instant, damages the index as it is updated for the newest picture. That is why cards so often die with the recent shots and take the index for the old ones with them.
Trying it in three readers did no harm and could have. Simply inserting a card into a laptop is usually harmless, but some systems will offer to check and repair it, and some cameras will write a small file the moment they see a volume they do not understand. The family clicked nothing, which is why the job started from an intact card rather than from one with a fresh index already written over the old one.
The one instruction that would have ended it was the one the camera kept giving. Formatting a card takes a matter of seconds and writes a clean index. It does not erase the pictures, but it removes the only surviving description of where each one begins and ends, which forces everything afterwards to be guessed at from content. On a card of holiday photographs that means recovered images with the wrong tail on them.
The card went behind a write blocker before it met any operating system, which closed off every remaining route by which it could be changed. It read at full speed for most of its capacity with a short region near the point of failure that needed slower passes, and a complete image was taken. The card itself then went into a drawer and played no further part in the job.
Working from the image, the directory area proved damaged rather than absent: the entries for the first week survived, the entries for the second were gone and the allocation table was inconsistent between its two copies. Files with surviving records were rebuilt by following their own chains. The remainder were carved by content signature, with each one rendered and inspected because a carved photograph with the wrong length shows it immediately in the bottom third of the frame.
The first week came back in full, cable car included. Of the second week about two thirds were recovered whole and a further handful came back with the lower part of the frame damaged, which was explained rather than quietly included. They were also shown that the camera had been writing a lower-quality duplicate of each shot, and those duplicates survived for several pictures where the full-size version did not.
A memory card is £250 + VAT. Nothing here needed the lid off and nothing was lifted off a circuit, so no fix, no fee applied and the bill did not follow until the family had been through the pictures.
Take the card out and stop there. Do not accept the format, do not put it back in the camera to see whether it has recovered overnight, and do not let a laptop check and repair it, because all three write to a card whose index is the only thing worth protecting. If you are still away and have another card, use that one and put the failed card somewhere rigid and dry. Free scanning software will often show you thumbnails, and seeing them is genuinely good news, but be careful about letting any tool save its results back onto the card it is reading, since that is how visible pictures become overwritten ones. When you send it, put it in a small hard case rather than loose in an envelope, and mention which day of the trip it failed on, because that tells the bench roughly where in the memory to expect the damage.
What this job cost, and on what terms. This one was charged at £250 + VAT, the figure agreed in writing before any work began. Paying for a job like this one. Nothing here called for the disk to be opened, a board rebuilt or a chip lifted off, which puts the work on the logical side of the line and under no fix, no fee. Files back, invoice follows; nothing back, nothing owed, and the media goes home either way. Four sorts of work sit outside that promise and only those four: DVR jobs, forensic jobs, chip-level work, and electronic or mechanical failure. The rest keep it, firmware and service-area repair included — both are logical jobs whatever their reputation suggests.
If yours is doing the same thing. This card was read at Oxford Data Recovery on the Oxford Science Park, about fifty-five miles down the M40. Post it tracked and insured, send it by a courier you book yourself, or bring it to the Oxford reception during Mon–Fri 9:00am–5:30pm — there is no collection service and no counter in Coventry. The free look at it takes two working days from booking in and produces one written figure that then holds.
Freephone 0800 689 0668 to talk it through first. The shipping form and what goes in the parcel are on the contact page, and every band is published in full — including which work sits outside no fix, no fee.
These are real enquiries, from households and from businesses in Coventry and out across Warwickshire — Nuneaton and Bedworth, Rugby, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Kenilworth, Solihull, Stratford-upon-Avon, Atherstone and Southam. Names are gone: the customer, the company, the job title, anything at all that would point back at a person. What stays is the reasoning — what turned up, where the fault genuinely sat, which approach it demanded, and which machine on the bench did the work. One of the thirty-six was refused, and it earns a place here as squarely as any of the rest.
A connector that never fitted properly has been working its solder joints loose the whole time
An intermittent contact writes half a change and leaves the index describing something that is no longer there
The aim is not a working stick at the end of it, and saying so changes what the job looks like
A holiday card the camera will not read? Ring 0800 689 0668 and refuse the format. Cards are £250 + VAT with the assessment free.