xD Memory cards

Photo recovery from most camera memory chips is fairly straight forward. If deleted, then file can be recovered, largely with original names. Failing that, data carving can be used to extract the photos. The only remaining issue is recovering fragmented photos, something that CnW Recovery software can do with a moderate success rate.

For some xD memory chips, they can be formatted rather than deleted and the end result is every sector (after a blank directory) is full of 0xFF. ie there is absolutely no information left to recover photos from.

There are theories that if you examine each bit on the memory chip you may discover that it is only at 99% the standard level which means it was previously a different level. This would require the complete resources of the FBI, and probably only have a 25% success rate on each chip. It would be far cheaper, and more successful to pay for the holiday again.

The moral as ever is to make sure that when ever photos are taken, they should be transfered to a new source (ideally multiple locations) and verfied before deleting the camera memory. The other advice is not to delete individual photos as there can be two problems. A single mistake can delete all the photos, and also new photos can be fragmeted making future data recovery harder.