Devices · cards out of cameras
Cards choose their moment — midway through a fortnight away, or midway through the copy that was meant to serve as a backup. Few things arrive here more often, from Plymouth, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly alike. A card reading empty, or locked, or showing nothing whatever will normally hand its pictures over. The condition attached is that nobody has formatted it first.
You will be talking to an engineer
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| What shows up | What that points to | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Canon: Cannot access the memory card, or Memory card error | The camera body cannot read the file system | Take it out and go no further |
| Canon DSLR: Card cannot be accessed, and then Reinsert/change the card | Contacts that want cleaning, or a controller going | Refuse the format offer |
| Nikon body reports Card may be damaged. Insert another card | Damage to the card, or nothing recognised at all | Never format it in the camera |
| Card locked / Card is write-protected | That small tab on the card's edge — or a controller that has locked | Tab in the right position? Then it is the card |
| A prompt to format the disk before use | The volume shows as RAW in Windows, though the frames are untouched | Decline whatever it offers |
| No memory card, while a card sits visibly in the slot | Either the controller is finished or the pads are | Work at chip level, then |
Whatever arrives is booked in under a case number on the day it reaches the bench. An engineer then works out the actual fault, and that part is free. You get a plain answer on what can come off the drive and what cannot, followed by one price in writing. Nothing further happens until you have read it and agreed.
A bit-for-bit clone comes before anything else. The card then returns to its sleeve, and every step from there onwards happens on the copy.
The clone is where repairs happen. If the file tables can be reconstructed, folder names come back attached to them. If not, pictures are recovered from their header bytes alone, and RAW is no more trouble than JPEG.
Counting files tells you nothing worth knowing. Recovered images are opened one at a time, and every one must render in full, at the dimensions the camera wrote it.
Thinking it over costs you nothing. Everything the drive gave up is listed for you before any invoice exists, and the bill only follows your go-ahead. Files travel back on media bought in for your job, with return carriage paid at this end, and the case stays on the bench until you confirm they open on your own computer.
The figure nobody actually holds: there is no dependable count of counterfeit cards in circulation. Laboratories and makers concur that it is a wide problem, fakes reach this bench often enough, and each solid-looking percentage in print began as an estimate. The real number would not change the rule anyway — anything written beyond a fake card's genuine capacity is past the reach of any lab.
Nothing was tried on the card itself. It went to a clone first, and every step after that ran on the copy: the file system was put back together, and a deep carve then went after the pictures that had lost their place in it. A 512GB SanDisk, loaded the evening before and reading empty by breakfast, gave up every frame. The photographer kept the client.
No. Formatting writes new file tables across the exact records carrying your folder and file names. Leave it untouched and a good deal more of it returns, names and all.
RAW too. Carving matches signatures at the head of a file, and RAF, DNG, ARW, NEF and CR3 all carry one; video containers behave the same way. A fair share of what arrives on this bench belongs to people shooting for a living.
Frequently not. On a monolith card everything lives on a single die, so if the break went past that die a chip-level read remains possible. Either way the card itself is finished.
Cards move faster than anything else here. The bulk of them are back inside two or three working days, sooner if a date is pressing. Give us the date you need them and the schedule is built backwards from it.
The diagnosis is free, and it comes back as a list: which files read, which do not, and what getting them off would take. Until then, leave the drive unplugged.