Drive Rescue to the rescue
Just when I thought my crammed fine arts paper is almost done, I suddenly realized that the SD Card's folder containing the photos (/DCIM/100CAMEA) is inaccesible to Windows and unseen to Linux. However, the photos are still browable through the camera's display. I tried both plugging the camera's interface cable and a third party card reader (by CD-R King) only to get the same ubfavorable results. I suspect this was due to recent proliferation of viruses targetting removable media (those that exploit autorun.inf) (I should had been more selfish!).
After failing to read the JPEG files from my SD card, I eventually remembered the night when Vera asked me for help on her unreadable USB flash drive. I used Drive Rescue to recover her files (downloadable here).
Figure 1. Jpg image files inaccessible to Window$ explorer but seen by Drive Rescue
I first encountered Drive Rescue at the free to use workstations at CSRC wayback 1st year college (VRD was not yet its coordinator). At that time (2002-03), floppies were still widely used and USB media doen't seem to exist yet. I saw it while browsing at the software on the start menu and copied it, thinking it would be useful at home where we had old hard drives (Seagate 120mb types (ST3144)) and lots of floppies (e.g., 22 floppy Win95, etc...). Despite being relatively old (2002), it works good for newer gadgets such as USB drives and SD cards.
