If your photos or videos suddenly vanish, stop using the storage device until you run a recovery. It worked for me.
Somewhat unbelievably, this isn’t the first time all of the pictures on one of my camera memory cards have suddenly disappeared. Well don’t worry, using testdisk / PhotoRec 6.10, you can automatically retrieve files which are present but not acccessible. Even if the files are mysteriously deleted, they are seldom erased – especially if you do not write any more files to the device after the deletion!
I simply installed testdisk on my Mac, plugged in the memory card, and chose to process the disk. After answering a couple of technical questions about the partition table type and file system (easy for USB or camera memory cards: almost always Intel and FAT, respectively), the software had already recovered 251 jpg files and 14 mpg files in less than 15 minutes (from a 4GB media card). Wonderful!
(NOTE: if the card had been full, this would have taken much longer)
Doing the Recovery
(Screenshot)
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
NB: The software is terminal-mode, so you’ll need to be familiar with command prompts on the Mac. If you’re not, just find a friend who is… and clarify that you need someone who isn’t just tech-trendy but is tech-savvy!
You’ll need to do things like (I forget the exact procedure, but it’s standard for the linux/UNIX community):
#(extract the files)
tar -xzf TestDisk.tar.gz
#(view the readme file)
less README
#(configure)
make configure
#(install)
make install
I had problems booting into Knoppix, Debian 4.0 “Etch” netinstall, and one or two other flavors of linux on my ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard. If you have this problem boot with the “irqpoll” option. I’m sure this can’t be the best thing, and shouldn’t be necessary, but it is in this circumstance. Examples: “install irqpoll” and “knoppix irqpoll”
The two symptoms I observed were:
- Knoppix boots from the CD at first, but then it cannot load the kernel.
- The Debian installer hangs when enumerating the hard disks (particularly an IDE disk on the JMicron RAID controller)
Windows had no such problems when I installed it. However, it did have what appeared to be a significant IRQ-sharing issue- choppy/stuttering audio whenever playing music or movies. Read more…
My X31 failed just after warranty expiration, and the failure is intermittent. I needed to run the PC Doctor software (available from Lenovo) to test the subsystems. However, there was a catch… I have no CD or floppy disk drive.
It’s time to boot from a USB flash memory drive. All we need is a bootable CD which we can image onto the USB stick. The previous contents of the USB stick will vanish!
On the Helper PC:
- Run linux (Knoppix is great).
- Download the PC Doctor bootable CD .iso file from Lenovo.
- mount the .iso file and obtain the .IMA file. This contains the bootable image.
mkdir /mnt/lenovoCD
mount -t iso9660 -o loop [lenovoCDname].iso /mnt/lenovoCD
ls /mnt/lenovoCD
- Look for evidence of a bootsector… usually contains error messages in the top 100 bytes or so. The file convention used here corresponds to bootable CDs produced by Roxio. You can find the text, “Roxio” contained in the image file.
vim /mnt/lenovoCD/[lenovoImagename].IMA
- Connect flash drive to helper PC.
- fdisk -l to list the partitions (and verify it’s the correct drive… capacity, etc.)
You’re probably looking for /dev/sdb or /dev/sdX
- Raw copy the image onto the USB drive, boot sector and all.
dd if=/mnt/lenovoCD/[lenovoImagename].IMA of=/dev/sdX
- Verify the image actually contained a partition table, is “primary,” “active,” etc.
fdisk -l
On the “broken” PC:
- Configure the BIOS to boot from USB mass storage (not all BIOSes can do this, and not all flash drives implement all of the necessary functions)
- Power down
- Insert the drive
- Boot up
Notes:
Use of a flash filesystem for repetitive operations is not recommended, due to the limited # of write cycles. Occasional booting of an image which loads into RAM should be no problem.
Friends on an Atlanta station.
We’ve all probably seen “rabbit ears” or other TV antennae constructed or augmented with aluminum foil. Here’s one that looks more convincing. It’s similar in area and shape to the old UHF loop antennas, except this one is attached to the wall with masking tape! This worked for us until Comcast finally connected the house with cable TV. Not that we watch TV anyway!
Note, this was for the old *analog* receiver, but you’d be surprised what you can get just messing around with some aluminum foil. The cable itself has a grounded sleeve and is a poor antenna. Just about anything attached to the center conductor is a better antenna than the cable alone.
Here is what worked for me:
- Simply roll up a sheet of foil and then bend it into a loop.
- Tape one end of the loop to the coax cable shield
- Twist the other end into a point and mash it onto the coax cable’s center conductor without letting it touch the shield.
(So you have a loop from the outer conductor (sleeve) to the inner conductor (protruding wire)).
- Antenna complete, tweak a bit to “tune” using stray capacitance, contact defects, etc.
- Enjoy sitcoms and advertisements.
NOTES: Keep in mind that we Atlantans have local broadcast antennas active 24/7, so a loop with any discernible area might actually be sufficient. Also, if this antenna doesn’t make any sense, consider that there may be non-Ohmic contact having a capacitive coupling effect, etc. Regardless what impedance this antenna presents to the TV, and how it’s matched to the 75 Ohm coaxial TV cable, it just worked and without any tricky positioning.
FEEDBACK: If you try this in a different area and it does/doesn’t work, please let me know. Also, if someone measures the 
characteristic of this thing, that would be helpful. Like I said, it may be that we have so much signal in this area that this low impedance & mismatched loop somehow works.