Good evening!

Looking for some help or direction.

I was filming a wedding yesterday using a Canon 5Dmk2 and my Transcend 32gb CF Card decided it wanted to stop working during a non-critical part of the ceremony. However, the files leading up to failure are critical. I immediately pulled the card and stopped using it for fear of losing or overwriting any potential data that could be saved.

I have tried numerous data recovery software solutions that have a free version, just to see if I could get a bite on the card. That being said, when I plug the card into my reader/the camera/the camera and then plug camera to computer, or directly into the computer I get the same results "The drive is unrecognizable, please format" or "Please format" right away.

One thing I noticed when using all of the recovery software, was that my card is listed as 0.0mb of 0.0mb whenever the software would read it. Which I know is inaccurate. Though it could be saying that due to it needing to be formatted. I was told by numerous people to not format it even though Recuva can potentially find any files post format, but no guarantee. Still not going to do it.

I was wondering if there were any other solutions some of you gurus may have for me. My wife was able to capture nearly everything I have on her camera, except she had a different angle than I had. The only thing missing is the grooms reaction to the bride, which I had a killer shot on, and then the groom getting ready at his home, as well as my angle of the first kiss/vows and ring exchange.

I did receive a quote from Data Savers for anywhere between 900-3600.00 for a 5-7 day turn around. That would be an absolute, and I mean absolute last resort, if a resort at all. I was told to take it to Best Buy and they can run diagnostics on the card to see if they could even recover anything for 49.99 and then they would have to send it off to their recovery center.

At this point im grasping at anything.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

For recovery process dumps must be read directly from memory chip. Both offer you receive is strange, one is too chip, second too expensive. Transcend card is quite often monolithic device.

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Flash Killer - everyday new resources (pinout, XOR, ECC,config) for flash devices

Best Buy won't be able to do anything for you. They will just plug it in and run some data recovery software (which you've already tried) and it'll fail. That having been said, the price you were quoted by Data Savers seems a bit high. Don't get me wrong they do good work, and I'd highly recommend them for their workmanship. I'd estimate for us to do it would be more like $600-1800 (unless it's monolithic, but I don't think it will be). It will largely depend on how many NAND chips are on the card, how many internal crystals they each have, what type of controller it uses and how difficult it is to work with. We'd have to take a look at it and see what we're up against before quoting it.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company