[plejon]

I have a very strange problem.

On august 15th, I took some pictures with my digital camera and stored them on the smartmedia card in the camera. On the 26th of august, I did the same thing. The pictures were visible on the small lcd screen of the camera.

Today, only the pictures of the 15th are visible using the camera or a smartcard reader connected to my PC. I can't see the pictures of the 26th, the ones from the 15th are visible.

The strangest thing is that the 26th pictures must still be on the card, but invisible. It's a 32 MB smartmedia card, the pictures of the 15th take about 4 MB, but the card report only 3 MB free space. This would be consistent with the size of the pictures of the 15th and the 26th. I tried deleting all files I could find on the card with the cardreader, but the card still reports "22 MB used", even though I can't see any files.

Any ideas ? Recovering the pictures is not my greatest concern. But I would like to "reset" the smartmedia card, as I can use only 8 MB of it now, instead of the full 32 MB

[plejon]

I was able to free up the space. I did a quickformat of the E: drive (driveletter assigned to the smartmedia in my cardreader)

It worked for me, I couldn't recover the pictures, but my card is at full capacity again.

Occording to this site, thisprocedure might not work for all cameras.
http://www.techadvice.com/tech/S/SmartMedia.htm

[Kerri Ann]

maybe the "invisible" pics are protected? (assuming you have a protect option to avoid accidental deletion of pics)
that may explain why you can't delete them....
have you tried manually pulling them from your camera to your computer in explorer?

[Kerri Ann]

oops, ok nevermind.....

[plejon]

They weren't protected, I checked that.

I really don't have a clue what went wrong. I've been using the camera and the card for about 4 years now, so I know how to operate it. Never had this sort of problem before. Very strange ...

[hewee]

Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery - recover pictures from media cards.

It is free too.

http://www.webattack.com/get/zaimagerecovery.shtml