Help. I used a CF card in my 5D for an event this week and had not yet downloaded the photos to my computer.
Yesterday, mistakenly, the same card was used in my daughter's XTI for a family event.
Now, my computer cannot recognize the card in either camera nor in a flash reader. What can I do?
I know I'm not helping but I have used cards on a 300D and a 10D without formatting in between before and nothing happened, the second camera just created a new folder and wrote away and a card reader saw everything.
Then again the 300D and 10D are very similar cameras, but I'm just wondering if the same is meant to have happened with your cameras, but by chance the card failed while being used on the second camera.
Did you format it before using it in the second camera? I'm guessing not since you didn't mention it, which is the best case scenario because both sets of photos should be on the card.
If there was a problem using the card the second time, the camera would have told you so and wouldn't have worked.
If you put the card in one of the cameras, can you view the photos on the camera LCD?
Either the card went bad (seems unlikely), or your computer is doing something strange. Just don't re-format the card, or at least that would be my approach. The pictures are there (if the camera actually took and wrote them to the card) and you just have to figure out how to get them to show up.
(Incidentally, using the card in two different cameras should be a complete non-issue unless there's something incompatible about the formatting from one camera to the other, but as I said, if that was the case, you'd have found out as soon as you tried to shoot with the second body because it wouldn't have recognized the card.)
Edited by Russ Isabella on Jan 27, 2008 at 08:05 PM GMT
I'd recommend what Mullet said. Reformat it so that the computer will read it and then run a recovery app against it. If Stellar doesn't work (I've never tried it), look up Testdisk/Photorec. I use it all the time, works wonderfully.
Using a card in two different cameras is not problematic - I've done it before, and it does not harm the card. However, if your flash reader cannot view your CF card, it makes me think that the card may somehow have become corrupted (though not due to being in multiple cameras).
Try Photorescue. It can read cards even when they're not assigned a letter. It will make an image of the entire drive by sector, and its free to use to see what images you can recover. At the point of recovery, you have to pay for it. I think that's pretty fair.
