Recovering Images post CF card formatting

A Compact Flash (CF) card is used for storing images, audios, videos, and other multimedia files safely and to make their portability easier. Formatting a card enables it to interact with the device it is being used by. It does so by setting up a file system. Sometimes, device specific information is also added to the card during formatting. After card corruption, formatting the card makes it reusable. While this resolves the problem of data inaccessibility, it erases all the data from the card. Thereafter, if there is no back-up available, one can use an Image Recovery Software to recover lost files.

An instance of this could be when you have two digital cameras, and you want to use the same card for both the cameras. You pull out the card from one camera immediately after clicking pictures and insert it into the other. You then get the following error message:

'Card is not formatted, format now?'

The images from the CF card then become inaccessible.

Cause:

There are two reasons due to which this problem occurs.
The first is that the read-write process is interrupted because the card was pulled out while the camera was on. This leads to corruption of the card, and therefore inaccessibility of the data thereon.
The second is that the card needs to be formatted in accordance with the system it is going to be used by. Most cards work fine even if the machine it is formatted on and the one it is used on are different. However in some cases, like this particular one, this mis-match gives rise to several problems.

Resolution:

After the above error message, if you select the 'no' option, your data will remain inaccessible. On the other hand if you format the card, it will erase all the data thereon. The only way to resolve the problem is to format the card in the camera (or mobile phone or any other storage device it is being used in) and then restore its data from a back-up. If there is no back-up available, use an Image Recovery Software to recover images lost from the card. Digital Image Recovery is safely performed using read-only recovery software. This ensures that the data is not altered during the recovery process.

Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery is a read-only Image Recovery tool that can retrieve lost files after any kind of data loss situation. It supports almost all the latest file formats, such as, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, AVI, MOV, etc. This application has an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface (GUI) and is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS.