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Things get more exciting when the card itself is put in jeopardy. If you lose a card, there’s
not a lot you can do other than take a picture of a similar card and print up some Have
You Seen This Lost Flash Memory? flyers to post on utility poles all around town.
If all you care about is reusing the card, and have resigned yourself to losing the pic-
tures, try reformatting the card in your camera. You may find that reformatting removes
the corrupted data and restores your card to health. Sometimes I’ve had success refor-
matting a card in my computer using a memory card reader (this is normally a no-no
because your operating system doesn’t understand the needs of your D7000), and then
reformatting again in the camera.
If your memory card is not behaving properly, and you do want to recover your images,
things get a little more complicated. If your pictures are very valuable, either to you or
to others (for example, a wedding), you can always turn to professional data recovery
firms. Be prepared to pay hundreds of dollars to get your pictures back, but these pros
often do an amazing job. You wouldn’t want them working on your memory card on
behalf of the police if you’d tried to erase some incriminating pictures. There are many
firms of this type, and I’ve never used them myself, so I can’t offer a recommendation.
Use a Google search to turn up a ton of them.
Chapter 14 ■ Nikon D7000: Troubleshooting and Prevention 475
THE ULTIMATE IRONY
I recently purchased an 8GB Kingston memory card that was furnished with some nifty
OnTrack data recovery software. The first thing I did was format the card to make sure it
was okay. Then I hunted around for the free software, only to discover it was preloaded
onto the memory card. I was supposed to copy the software to my computer before using
the memory card for the first time.
Fortunately, I had the OnTrack software that would reverse my dumb move, so I could
retrieve the software. No, wait. I didn’t have the software I needed to recover the software
I erased. I’d reformatted it to oblivion. Chalk this one up as either the ultimate irony or
Stupid Photographer Trick #523.
DIMINISHING RETURNS
Usually, once you’ve recovered any images on a memory card, reformatted it, and
returned it to service, it will function reliably for the rest of its useful life. However, if you
find a particular card going bad more than once, you’ll almost certainly want to stop
using it forever. See if you can get it replaced by the manufacturer if you can, but, in the
case of Secure Digital card failures, the third time is never the charm.