borked compact flash question

[omega pwned]

so i have a friend who ostensibly borked her compact flash card while taking some pictures with her camera. she has told me neither the computer or the camera can read the card. is there anything i can do to salvage the files? she has the same problem with a usb stick as well. also, can somebody point me in the direction of some decent high capacity CF cards 233x or faster?

[burningcpu]

My guess is that you need to show her the safely remove hardware function in Windows.

[omega pwned]

HAHA lol yeah i went over that with her.

[JCLW]

I'd recommend a UDMA capable card made with SLC chips.

Note that your reader is probably going to limit your transfer speed. If your reader (or your card) only supports PIO mode 4 (for example), then you're only ever going to get a maximum of 16.6MB/s.

Exactly the same as hard drives:

PIO mode 0 - 3.3 MB/s
PIO 1 - 5.2
PIO 2 - 8.3
PIO 3 - 11.1
PIO 4 - 16.7
PIO 5 - 20
PIO 6 - 25
Ultra DMA mode 0 - 16.7 MB/s
UDMA 1 - 25
UDMA 2 - 33.3
UDMA 3 - 44.4
UDMA 4 - 66.7
UDMA 5 - 100
UDMA 6 - 133.3

I've grown to like these Transcend cards: http://www.transcend.co.jp/Support/DLCenter/Datasheet/Datasheet%20CF266(2GB_8GB).pdf. Fast, cheap, and so far 100% reliable (even after going through the laundry a few times).

[gangaskan]

i have a few Ultra II cards that i like (SD, but cf is the same)


you can pick up II and III's for cheap now aday's 20 bucks for 2 gigs or so iirc

[Madwand]

so i have a friend who ostensibly borked her compact flash card while taking some pictures with her camera. she has told me neither the computer or the camera can read the card. is there anything i can do to salvage the files? she has the same problem with a usb stick as well.

Yes, there are several CF/USB file recovery tools which you can find on-line through Google / etc. Note that the first guiding principal should be to do nothing to the card, but to just read the data as well as possible, copying that to a folder on your computer.