Hi everyon,

I have a Digital Rebel [300d] and had a strange experience with it yesterday.
Here's what happened - sorry it's a long post but I don't want to leave anything out that might be useful.

In the recent past I have had a couple of error messages when trying to take a picture - I believe error 01, but can't remember for sure. When that has happened I have taken out the battery and put it back in and things have worked fine afterwards. This is the original camera battery and is now several years old.

My 2GB CF card [133x] had about 30 photos on it from before this session. I've been using this card for about a year, with no apparent problems. As always, I had formatted it before taking those 30 pictures.

Late yesterday afternoon I went out shooting, using RAW mode as usual. I used the preview mode to look at the histogram of shots as I was taking them, but did not generally go back to look at the pictures after they had been written to the card.

About a half hour in, the camera stopped working and gave the indication that the battery was dead. I didn't think it should be dead because it showed fully charged just before that shot. I took it out and put it back in and the camera resumed working.

After about another half hour, I wanted to check out a photo I had just taken and went to open it. The first picture it displayed was one I had taken a half hour earlier. I took a couple more pictures and noticed that the camera appeared to be writing the images to the card as normal. However, the same image from a half-hour earlier kept coming up when I went to open up the images. I then noticed that the display indicated that I could take 136 more pictures before filling up the card, both before and after taking a shot. I took several shots and saw that this number remained the same. Also, the number of images on the card remained the same at 164. At that point I assumed that the camera simply wasn't writing the latest pictures to the card and stopped shooting. I didn't have a spare card on me at the time.

When I got home and uploaded the images I discovered that the most recent shots were in fact there. But when I went back to look at the first photos I had taken I discovered that those were gone.

The original 30 images that were on the card when I started were untouched. The numbering sequence is uninterrupted. The most recent images have later times but lower numbers than the ones taken earlier. For example, image 398-9802 was taken at 5:56 but image 398-9842 was taken at 5:34. It seems that the camera actually replaced the photos taken earlier that day with photos taken later on.

I recharged the battery, put the same card back in the camera after downloading the pictures, but didn't reformat or erase it, and now the camera is again working as normal.

I spoke to Canon about this. The person I spoke to had never encountered this before but suggested changing out the CF card and replacing the time and date battery, which I will do. In the meantime, though does anyone have a clue about this? I'm wondering if this is something worse than a bad card.

Thanks!

Is this a Lexar memory card?

Sure is.

around 2 or 3 years ago there was a issue with Lexar cards used in canon dslr's, the issue was that these problem cards were deleting files only when used on canon dslr's, Lexar replaced the cards with updated ones which resolved the problem, when did you buy the card and what is the exact model?

Thanks for the info. I would guess that bought it about a year and a half to two years ago. Will know more tonight when I can check my files. As to the model, it is a Lexar Professional Compact Flash with Write Acceleration. The part number is 2952 Rev A. Does this help?

The lexar cards that had the issue were 80x cards, you have the 133x cards so i think that rules out those old faulty lexar cards, there is the possibility that your card is a counterfeit, is this issue repeatable? try another card, preferably not the same model and see if the issue is with that, you narrow down the culprit to see if its the camera or the card, then call technical support for which one is at fault, others should chime in here as well which is actually sometimes better then the manufactures technical support.

You'll need to look on lexar's site to confirm which card it is. I don't remember it affecting the 133x cards, however, I only remember 80x cards.

My 1DIIN and lexar 2GB 80x cards did not like each other, resulting in corrupted images on a couple shots. However, it did not replace entire sets of shots and only individual shots were corrupt.

You may wish to try some form of image recovery software - i know sanddisk extreme III cards come with software for image recovery that is supposed to do well. I sorta remember that the lexars came pre-loaded with software for this as well...

Hope you can get your images back and figure things out.

I appreciate all the responses - this really is a tremendous resource! I'll see if the recovery software is helpful.

One thing puzzles me about this. If the card were malfunctioning, wouldn't I expect to see a disruption in the numbering sequence? I would have thought that the camera tells the card what to name the image file and that the card then decides where the file goes. Here there is no interruption of the numbering, which suggests to me that the camera forgot the names of the files that it had written. What do you think?

Even with that its hard to tell, hope you figure it out soon....nothing worse than going out and getting some great shots or once in a lifetime shots to find out they disappear, good luck friend.

I hope you still have the card intact. I would make a copy of it and send it to both
Lexmar and Canon and ask them to talk to each other to determine what may have
gone wrong. Indeed, it is the camera that determines the file name, and if it repeats
a file name that already exists then that existing file will be overwritten (so I would
strongly suspect a Canon glitch)..

I'm going to lean toward power (battery) issues as being the likely culprit. Something probably didn't get stored correctly onto the CF card—probably when the camera unexpectedly showed the battery as dead—and things went downhill from there.

I would definitely replace that date/time battery, and if your main battery is getting old you might want to replace that, too. A Li-Ion battery has a typical service life of two to three years after manufacture. You can buy replacements from SterlingTek or Diamondback fairly inexpensively.

I presume that you're not using a battery grip.

The Lexar card issue shouldn't affect you. It was an incompatibility between early Lexar 80x cards and the Digic II (and presumably Digic III) chip. You don't have a Digic II in the DReb/300D and your CF card is a 133x, so it definitely shouldn't be an issue for you.

I tend to agree that it may have started when the battery glitch occurred. Of course, I wonder if something in the camera is at fault with that as well, since the battery was not in fact dead but reasonably fresh.

However, since I recharged the battery I've had no issue. I believe I will go ahead and replace both batteries.

Thanks again.

I had a similar issue happen with my 40D recently. It turned out that the camera was randomly selecting between two different numbering ranges each time I powered it up. So sometimes when I took photos, if it had picked the lower number sequence, when I would try to review the photo, a previously taken (but higher sequence number) photo would be displayed on the camera back. To me, it did not seem like it was storing the photo I had just taken. After I got back home, I figured out what the camera was doing and all the shots were present (just not numbered sequentially.) Pretty darn bizarre. Sorting the files by date listed all the pictures in the correct, as shot order.

From your description, it appears that your files were deleted, but I would check to see if the photos you think are missing are actually stored with a different numbering range.

Alas, I looked at the card in the Finder window and none of the lost files were there. Also, I was unable to locate the recovery software [probably formatted over it long ago - I had to buy this card when I was on vacation and couldn't copy anything onto my computer before using it], although I notice that Lexar has some recovery software for sale. At this point I'm not ready to buy anything for this purpose because I believe the files really were written over, but the card is still there and if I can find some freeware I'll give it a try.

I've had success with this: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Priced right (free) and very, very effective.

Thanks for the suggestion. I downloaded PhotoRec but struggled with the interface since it operates in a Terminal window under OS 10.3.9. Had a hard time pointing it at the CF card. I'm going to call Lexar and see if they have any suggestions.

Just to close the loop on this - I called Lexar and they were kind enough to email me their Image Rescue software. I ran it against the card but it didn't find any of the missing shots. Thanks again to everyone who offered help on this!