I have a digital camera that uses CF cards and I pull the card to view the pictures in my Axim sometimes.
Like an idiot I forgot to copy some images from the card before I reformated it in the camera.
Once I realized my mistake I have not touched the cards since.
I remember back in the DOS days that Norton Utilities had a tool that might help.
Does anyone make program for the Axim that might can recover the images?
Thanks

I am interested in the answer to this as well. In terms of data security does formatting the card wipe it clean with no data image? or is it saved just like magnetic media. Does anyone know?

There is freeware called Digital Image Recovery that is supposed to help recovered deleted pictures. I believe that it works when you use a card reader (i.e., put your CF card in card reader that is connected to your PC and software will detect new drive and work on whatever is on that card).

PeteW, I think that fact that data can be recovered from media cards indicates that it is not wiped clean but just made unaccessible.

          

_IF_ a format of a CF card is done similar to a format of a floppy or a hard drive, the data is still on the media (media or CF). Especially if you do it with format /quick. All that does is wipe the FAT entries to the data. With the right tools you can bring the data back manually.

I just used that Digital Image Recovery program and it work perfectly. I was hoping for something for the PDA but I was desparate for anything that worked.
As far as I can tell, if you can connect to the media card in some way, it can restore the images.
I tested it with the tiny little 8 meg card by formatting the card in the camera, taking some pictures and then reformatting the card in the camera. I connected the camera via the USB cable to my PC and ran the program and it brought back all the pictures and others that were still on the card.
I also plugged the CF card into my card reader and was able to recover images.

I also installed the software on my laptop and plugged the CF card into the PCMCIA slot with the adaptor and it worked that way.

With my Axim connected to my PC and running the software I was not able to "see" the CF card or the SD either.

Thanks Gigi is a great program!

davidtyree, glad it worked. Hope I will never need it but in case I do, it's good to know someone has had success with it!

          

I also tried Digital Image Recovery but it did not work on my SD card. It did not recover any images. The card was a Viking SD card with pictures on it that I made with a Pentax Optio S camera. I lost all the pictures after using the card in my Axim and both the Axim and Windows with a card reader said that my card was not formatted.

I tried several freeware and shareware image recovery programs and also a few commercial demos. None of the freeware and shareware solutions worked and most of the commercial demos were not convincing. Finally, I found an excellent piece of software, PhotoRescue (see http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/ ) that successfully recovered all my images (and even a few ones that I intentionally deleted earlier). The software is commercial but at $29, I am very happy to have recovered more than 100 vacation pictures with it. The good thing is that there is a free demo that does the recovery and shows thumbnails of recovered images, so you can actually check if it really works on your card before buying it. It even restored the AVI video files I made with the camera, though those AVIs remained corrupt. I used the freeware program Virtual Dub (see www.virtualdub.org), which can recover even badly corrupted AVI files, and in fact, I was able to restore all my AVIs with it.

Another similar program to PhotoRescue is Mediarecover (see www.mediarecover.com ). I tried its demo and it worked but did not restore the AVIs at all and it is more expensive than PhotoRescue.

So, if the freeware solutions don't work for your card, my recommendation is PhotoRescue and then VirtualDub if you happen to have some corrupt video files, too.